


The Wanting Winter

by Callali



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Dark, Developing Character(s), Developing Relationship, F/M, Minor Original Character(s), Post-QI, Queen in the North (or close to it), Slightly Apocalyptic, Supernatural Elements, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-04-20 00:43:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 36,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4767155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callali/pseuds/Callali
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night is dark and full of terrors, and a winter night is longest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer 1: This is not my universe, these are not my characters, I am not intending any theft or making any profit. Disclaimer 2: I am a college student with little writing experience. Updates may be irregular. Things may be unfortunate. Who knows. Disclaimer 3: Sansa's POV/Sansa-centric. Rickon is messed up, because why wouldn't he be? Actually, everyone is messed up, because why wouldn't they be? Also, I am a gardener, not an architect, it would seem.

The great oak door peeked open with a barely audible creak. Cautious feet crept across the carpeted stones, soft and slippered. Sansa could barely see outlines and shadows in the dim morning light: a chair here, a bed just there, and lying in the bed—a man.

The man had ridden up to the gates some hours before daybreak, announcing himself to be Sandor Clegane and asking to be placed at the mercy of Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell. When the guards began to take him to a cell, he had not protested, or had been unable to. Young Maester Haywyn, however, had seen something odd in the situation, and nervously roused his lady to see what ought to be done.

Sansa had stared at him, mouth agape, her hair a fuzzy, sleep-mussed halo around her confused expression.

“Do not take him to the cells, of course. Take him to a room. And see to his needs,” she spilled out, her words sounding too fast and clipped to her own ears.

After the Master scampered off down the corridor, Sansa climbed back in bed and fluffed her furs and covers back around her. Her first instinct was to don her robe and scamper after him, but that is not the type of thing a lady should do. She could not go running half-clothed to make acquaintance with a ghost. Or an imposter.

Her mind was racing, her hands were shaking, and the fire had gone cold. There would be no more rest on this night. After waiting as long as she possibly could, she outfitted herself in a warm and simple dress, stepped into her shoes, and flitted away to the Maester’s chambers. Now, that same Maester stood behind her as she ineptly gawked at a massive lump of a person lying in a sickbed. Presumably this lump was the Hound.

Maester Haywyn quietly cleared his throat behind her. “My lady?”

Suddenly remembering herself, she backed away from the sleeping man and led the Maester back into the hallway. She stepped a few paces from the man guarding the chamber. “I can confirm that this man is who he says he is, but how is he here? What is wrong with him?” she whispered, nervously smoothing her skirts.

“Well, it is as I said, my lady. He simply arrived, stated his business, and then collapsed.”

“He collapsed?”

“Yes...exposure, mostly, I would presume. I don’t know what possessed him to travel at such a time, winter is here, and getting more wintery by the hour. There are more--”

“Yes, Maester, thank you,” she said, finding little patience for Haywyn’s gentle rambling on this occasion. “You believe he will recover?”

“Well, yes, it seems so. He has been far too long in the cold, but seems to be improving in just a few short hours. I have not had a chance to examine him fully, of course.”

“You can do so when he wakes,” she said. Every part of her wanted to dismiss the guard, declare him friend, and tell everyone with ears that she knew he was not dead and that he was not the butcher of the Saltpans. She knew the Hound was alive.

Once again, that was not something a lady could do. In truth, it was a wonder they hadn’t killed him straight away at the gate.

“The guard will remain at his post, but you will inform the necessary persons that he is not a prisoner, and is not to be treated as one. I will speak to my brother about it when he wakes. Thank you for consulting me before he was thrown in a cell,” she trailed off, noting the curiosity in the Maester’s kindly eyes, but hoping he would keep it to himself.

“Very well, my lady, I will see to it. Would you like for me to walk you to your chambers?”

“No thank you, I believe I know the way,” she tried to jape, but her voice sounded flat and tired.

 

+

 

She had smiled sweetly to the Maester, turned on her heel, and started walking toward her rooms, but that is not where she went.

She went to the kitchens for a cup of milk and some hot porridge with cinnamon. The castle was almost stirring, the cook was cooking, and Sansa was hungry and chilly and restless. She quickly but gracefully ate her small breakfast, making chitchat with the women who worked with the food and the laundry. She thought she was perhaps a bit too friendly with them, but she could not see any harm in it, and they were all so very kind to her on the nights and mornings she could not sleep. Some parts of being Alayne Stone the bastard might very well have stuck with her.

The rooms were getting brighter. She began to see people shuffling around, seeing to their tasks, bringing to day to a slow, dusky start. She could lie to herself no longer--she knew where she wanted to be. She knew why she wanted to be there. Now she would have to hurry.

She bid farewell to the rosy-cheeked, heavyset cook and her gaggle of well-meaning serving girls. Hugging her elbows to fight off the morning chill, she darted up stairs and through doorways, down halls and around corners, until she found herself face-to-face with the guard in front of the Hound’s sickchamber. Or, rather, face-to-neck.

The guard eyed her suspiciously, weighing an order against a duty in his mind. She smiled shyly and tilted her head, beckoning for him to let her through. He frowned, but stepped aside. Sansa quietly creaked open the door once again and entered the still-dark room. Catching herself, she poked her head out from behind the door.

“You will say nothing?” she said to the guard. It was said with the inflection of a question, but with the quirk of an eyebrow, and the confidence of a command. The guard frowned with even more passion, but nodded once. He understood.

Satisfied, she closed the door behind her, and let her eyes adjust to the light. She suddenly felt inappropriate—terribly inappropriate—for being alone with a man in a bedchamber, watching him sleep. The she remembered how he used to scare her, used to _stalk_ her, and she had to stifle a huff. Fair is fair. She settled herself in for a long wait.

 

+

 

The morning light grew in strength and conviction, until it was jabbing through the cracks in the window hangings, invading the chamber with its near-warmth.

Sansa sat primly in her chair, and looked upon the terrible face of Sandor Clegane.

His burns startled her. She had thought of him often over the years, but somehow she must not have remembered him very correctly. She mostly remembered his eyes, and his considerable height, leaning over her with a sneer. The lines and crags of his ruined face confronted her, but she held firm and did not look away. She remembered the story he had told her, and she was heartbroken anew. He was ugly, piteously ugly, that much was true, but ugly is not the worst thing a person can be. Not by far.

With each passing moment she grew increasingly anxious. She had felt drawn here, felt that there was no other place she could possibly be at such a time, and yet she anticipated and feared the moment that he would wake. Each time he barely moved or twitched she would jump inside her body despite herself, and then berate herself for being so stupid. Bastard-brave, she thought, but that wasn’t right. Stark-brave, wolf-brave was what she should be.

It was not quite mid-morning when she chanced to look to his face the exact moment that his eyes opened.

Some instinct must have told him that he wasn’t alone. He moved his head and looked right at her, and the moment of horror was upon her. The words she had been rehearsing choked in her throat, and she was dumbstruck and afraid. He frightened her—he was different, and he was looking at her with an expression she could not read, and it was too unreal.

“Hello,” she almost whispered. What more could she say? How could she ever say it all?

He just looked at her, intense, in pain, like he wasn’t sure if he was going to speak or vomit. For the first time she noticed how pale he was, how gaunt, and it looked so wrong on him. He should be fierce and strong, not weak and fevered.

Making a quick decision against her better judgment, she stood abruptly, grasped the simple wooden chair, and moved it close to his bedside. His head fell back to the pillow, but his eyes stayed on her. He looked like a cornered animal, she thought.

“I have much to say to you,” she said simply, trying to evoke her mother’s soft authority, “and you look as though you have much to say as well. But now you are sick and weak from travel, and I am...I am ill at ease,” she said, amazed at how the truth had flown from her lips.

His gray eyes yet pinned her, but he swallowed hard, and nodded.

“When you are stronger, we will speak.” Her voice dropped too low, too familiar. She felt utterly without control of herself. Sansa the woman was fluid; she flowed like water into any container, any situation. She sang her songs with grace and precision. Sansa the girl, however, had known this man. She had shown him her true expressions, had challenged him, had been challenged by him. She felt as though she were grasping for some midway point between the two, and was clumsily failing to find it.

She thought that, even if she had been given time to prepare, she still would not have known how to handle this.

No thought was involved when she reached toward him and lightly placed her hand across his forehead, her thumb stroking the hairline on the side that was whole.


	2. Chapter 2

“I knew that you were different, somehow,” she said, daintily pinching off pieces of a warm buttermilk muffin and taking them to her lips.

“And how am I different?” said the man propped up against the headboard.

“Well, you are quieter. Your eyes are different. And you—your mouth. You twitch less,” she said, dropping her eyes, embarrassed at her own frankness.

“Do I? That’s wonderful news,” he snorted. She gave him an apologetic smile and returned her attention to her breakfast. He had awoken on the second day less feverish and more alert, and she had decided she did not wish to wait any longer to learn what had happened to the Hound. She had brought her breakfast to his bedside and braced herself for what he would say. Sometimes he talked and she listened. Sometimes she chewed and he watched her. When his talking had mostly run its course, they simply sat in the room together. The midmorning sun streamed curiously into the room, making Sansa feel relaxed and lazy as an old cat. Theirs was a comfortable silence, but she found the need to break it. The story wasn’t finished.

“What made you decide to leave the Quiet Isle and make a mad run for Winterfell?” she asked. The last heaves of autumn had long passed, and now winter’s hammer stood poised. She had thought him to be a practical man.

“Couldn’t stand to spend the winter on an island full of septons,” he said. She just looked at him. While that was most likely true, he was lying in his own way. He sighed.

“Like I told the guards. I came to be at your mercy,” he said simply.

“Why?” she asked, brows furrowed.

He took a breath and rolled one massive shoulder, suddenly seeming uncomfortable.“Because I didn’t protect you. Then I attacked you, just like all the rest. There’s no one left alive I would serve, save for you. You can send me away, or have my head, or set me to stirring the stew in the kitchens. Whatever you say, I’ll do it.” She could not keep the shock from her face. It seemed they remembered very different versions of the same events. But memory was a funny thing, and Sansa knew that hers was a fickle beast.

“I cannot think why I should have your head. I counted you as an ally in King’s Landing. I cannot think why I would send you away, for that would be the same as having your head, I should think,” she chanced a glance at him, and his expression confirmed her thoughts. “As for stirring stew, that would be a waste of your knowledge and talents, and I do not manage a wasteful estate.”

She rose from her chair in one lithe movement and walked over to the low bedside table. She took the cup and pitcher there and poured him a fresh drink of water. She handed him the cup and lowered herself onto the bed beside him. “My brother, Rickon, has been returned to us,” she almost whispered. “But he is not well. He is not as a young boy should be.”

“You want me to be his sworn shield?” he asked. “That didn’t go so well with the last one.”

“You misunderstand me. He does not need protection. No, what he needs is a friend.”

“A _friend_?”

“A friend, or just someone to talk to, someone to be with. Someone who understands him. Forgive me, but I think you must know a thing or two about being a young boy and being unwell,” she said. He looked at her seriously then nodded. She had him, there. “He is prone to fits of rage,” she continued. “And rightly so. I do not know how to help him, or how to soothe him. He has no interest in his lessons with the Maester. All he wishes to do is fight and play with Shaggydog, and to hide from the world in the Godswood or the crypt.” She sighed, suddenly feeling very discouraged. She childishly wished for her mother. She knew that she was grasping at straws, pretending that she had the answers. “I want you to help my brother in the ways that you can, if you can. Other than that, I would like for you to join our men at arms, if you are able. They are improving, but most of them are young or untrained or both. Perhaps your experience will be of use to them,” she finished.

“I’m able, just not quite as able as I used to be,” gesturing at his leg. “When do I start?”

“When you are well recovered,” she said. “And after I have chirped some pretty words to combat your reputation.”

He winced then, and looked truly angry for the first time since he had returned to her.

She took his hand, aware that she was behaving inappropriately but not finding it within herself to care. She felt his warmth, the terrain of his palm simple and coarse like a cloak she had taken for comfort long ago. She felt him still and go tense, and she suddenly felt very stupid. Of course he would not want to be touched. Holding the hand of Sandor Clegane suddenly seemed as silly as giving Stranger a crown of flowers. “All else aside,” she said, “I am very glad you are here.” She released him, rose from his bed, smoothed her skirts, and took her leave.

 

+

 

Several days passed in the usual way. Sansa woke up, readied herself, ordered dinner, held court with Rickon, then helped him answer letters. She oversaw the creation of wall hangings and inspected doors and gates and new additions. She stole into unused bedchambers for precious moments alone, then stepped back out into the whirlwind of duty. She spoke with guards and smallfolk, builders and crafters and men-at-arms. She smiled and laughed at dinner, her melodic notes drifting over the typical din and chatter. She excused herself, bothered Maester Haywyn for a cup of calming tea with lemon, and let the familiar arms of her personal chambers fold around her. She collapsed into her nest of bedding, exhausted but proud of her work. Winterfell was rising from the ashes just in time for it to prove its ancient worth and purpose: a haven for the depths of winter, built as a stronghold against the horrors of the north. Sansa felt the strength returning to her bones. In her mind, she felt she could finally call herself a Stark again. Sometimes, she would rest her palms on the smooth, gray stones, feeling the warmth there, imagining that the castle were its own living entity, breathing her truth back into her lungs.

She needed all the strength and truth she could summon to face the task before her. First, her brother, the wild one. The mad wolf. And then, anyone else who had ears and a mind and had heard news of the Hound's activities. Despite the misgivings and years between them, her heart had swelled at the return of her old familiar. She had missed him.

She found her brother in the Godswood.

Her boots made pure little sounds in the snow: the satisfying crunch of the ground being packed beneath her delicate footfalls. Rickon was sitting near the heart tree their father used to frequent, looking pitiful and, for once, still. He looked at her when she approached him, then looked back down at the ground.

"Hello, Rickon," Sansa said with a soft smile. What mood was he in on this day?

"Hello, sister," came his dark reply. "Why does Shaggy have to stay in the Godswood?"

"We have discussed this," she said. "He has to stay here because the others are frightened of him. Perhaps in time he will calm, and then he can go with you wherever you please."

"I don't _want_ him in the Godswood. He can't be a _wolf_ in the Godswood, with walls all around him," he nearly growled, sounding far too menacing for a child. Sansa heard the meaning behind his words, and sighed.

"Rickon."

His eyes snapped to her, not used to her serious tone.

"Shaggy is wild and ferocious, and that is not his fault. He has been made that way, as have you. He attacks people, Rickon. Do you understand what that means?"

"It means he is angry!" Rickon shouted, rising to his feet. "He is angry all the time!" _Shaggy, or you, brother?_

"If he attacks another person we will have to _kill_ him, and he will never be angry again, will he?" Her brother's face twisted with rage, but he quieted and sat down violently once again. Sansa took a seat on the stone beside him.

"I lost my wolf," she said quietly. "My sweet little Lady, who never did anything wrong, not once in her life. I cannot describe to you how that feels, and I never want you to know it. That is why Shaggy has been confined instead of put down. I have done this against what is fair and against the wishes of the men he has savaged and their families. I have done all I can do, and more." He stared at the ground, sullen but admitting defeat. "I want nothing more than to release him so that he can be with you always. But before that can happen, you have to help him. He cannot learn how to be good on his own. He needs you, and he needs time."

"And then he can come out?" Rickon said.

"Yes, then he can come out. But not before."

An icy wind began to tease her hair and the dark red leaves of the weirwood, so similar now. The opportunity to spend time outdoors was fast ending. Soon there would be snow taller than men, and black noses and fingers for those fool enough to brave the open air.

A silent moment passed between them, murky but not hostile, and Sansa resisted the urge to stroke her brother's hair, or to pull him close to her. He needed comfort, but he needed it down in his core, where no patting or stroking could reach. He was too wild for cuddles, and almost too old, besides.

"Rickon, please come meet me in the kitchens soon. We will have something hot to drink, and then I have someone I would like you to meet."

 

+

 

The young wolf stood awestruck beneath the shadow of Sandor Clegane. "You're very tall," he said. "Are you part giant?"

"Not that I know of," he replied, bending a knee until he was more or less of a height with the boy. "That better?"

"Yes." Rickon looked him straight in the face, Sansa noted. This was going well.

“What happened to your face?”

"Rickon!" she gasped. The large man met her eyes, gave a dismissive shrug, and turned back to the boy.

"My brother did it when I was young. He held my face in a brazier."

"Why?" Rickon asked. Sandor looked at him evenly.

"Because he was a monster, and that's the sort of thing monsters do."

Rickon nodded. "Where is he now?" he asked.

"He's dead. Dead twice over."

"My brothers died too. Except they weren't monsters. I had a brother named Robb who was King in the North, and my other brother was Bran and he fell off a tower and couldn't walk anymore. And Jon went to the Wall. My mother and father and Arya are dead, too, and Sansa is my sister. Sansa told me that you saved her life.” The cold wind nipped against Sansa's reddened cheeks. Her brother's eyes shone with rapt attention as the older man rasped his answer.

"I saved her from a mob in King's Landing. She almost forgot to thank me." Sansa's head whipped over, and she saw that the good corner of his mouth was barely tugged into smirk. He surveyed her embarrassment and her brother's confusion, deciding to let it go with a laugh. "Ever learn how to use a sword, boy?" he said, gesturing to the near-deserted training yard. Rickon shook his head.

"Only a spear. Only a little," he said, holding his fingers up in a pinch.

"Would you like to?" The boy's head nodded so violently that Sansa feared it would bobble right off. "We'll have some wooden ones made, then we'll start."

"I'll go right now!" said Rickon, bounding off to do just that. Sandor shook his head, chuckling. With a start, Sansa realized that she was alone with him for the first time since he had risen from sickbed. As he rose to his full height and brushed the snow from his kneeling knee, she found herself not quite as brave as before.

"He is very impressed by you," she said. "Perhaps you will get on well." She smiled naturally, despite herself. A dark expression flickered across his face.

"Nothing to be impressed by anymore, but I can teach a boy how to swing a sword." She did not understand his meaning: he seemed to move much better than she expected after hearing of his injury.

"The wind chills me. Would you be so kind as to walk with me inside?" she said. His darkness had settled in, it seemed, but he offered his arm all the same.


	3. Chapter 3

The fire was roaring in her large solar. She occupied a chair close to it—her body was cold then hot then cold again in turns, and she had decided to err on the side of heat. She slowly nursed a cup of spiced wine, if for no other reason than to give her hands a purpose.

His chair was further from the fire; further from her. It seemed an odd distance to have such a conversation. His eyes were dark and flickering, illuminated and shadowed by the fire. His boots were anchored to the floor, his large hands to the ends of the armrests, and he was still—so still. His stillness unnerved her at times.

“And then it was now?” he asked lowly.

“Yes, and then it was now, I suppose.” She traced the rim of her wine cup. “Rickon is the true Lord of Winterfell, or Warden of the North, or whatever he shall be called when the snows melt.”

“What does that make you?”

“It makes me his sister, his mother, his advisor. It makes me the one who rations the foods and plans the meals and listens to the smallfolk and keeps the numbers…” Her slender hand came up to pinch the bridge of her nose. “It makes me a lady with a temporary purpose, and only a summer’s store of wisdom.”

He considered her for a moment. “You do better than you think. The people are fed, the castle is in repair. Your brother is safe.”

“Yes, but will it be enough?”

“Might be, might not be. What more would you do?”

“I would make them love me, but it seems I cannot. I was the least of all the Starks, especially now. Some see me as a Lannister twice over. Some whisper of awful things—a dead husband and two dead betrotheds, and then Petyr…” There was no need to whisper over Petyr: any who found they had curiosities could go view the stump upon which his head was cleaved from his body.

Sandor’s jaw worked, punctuated by the occasional twitch. All of these men had spotted her life like mold on bread, and he seethed over them.

“Whatever I do, it makes no matter,” she continued. “Rickon will grow and rule, as he should. Then he will marry, as he should. Then I fear I will be without place or purpose.”

“You could have Winterfell if you want it. It is yours by rights.”

“I want _peace_ ,” she whispered. The wine was making her drowsy after such a long day. The room was overwarm by now, but she did not wish to rise from her chair. Remembering Blackwater and recounting all that had happened after it had made her tired in her bones. She rested her head on the back of her hand.

The empty wine cup was sliding from her fingers, and she jolted out of her half-sleep to see Sandor crouched in front of her. His calloused fingertips brushed her skin as he released the cup and set it aside.

“Time to get in your nest, little bird,” he said, standing and offering his hand.

She did not pull herself up: she placed her hand in his, but then slid it up his wrist, feeling his unfamiliar terrain. He leaned forward and her hand felt his arm, his shoulder. When he lifted her from the chair, her arm was a featherlight brush across his back.

This is how babes must feel in the womb, she thought, as the gentle sway saw her through her personal chambers to the bedroom. He laid her upon the mattress as though she were a length of Myrish lace. After she heard her chamber door creak closed, she had enough thought to wriggle out of her shoes and dress before all was dark.

 

+

 

“The glass must be replaced,” said Catelyn Stark.

“Glass is not easy to come by,” said Sansa.

Their skirts swished through the worn paths in the glass gardens, inspecting and walking in a companionable silence. The sun was high and burning: even outside the glass, it must have been quite warm. Her mother’s hair fell in waves, loose from its usual plaits and twists. She discarded her cloak, baring her alabaster neck and her regal shoulders. _Will I be as beautiful as you, Mother?_

“Will you brush my hair for me while you are here?” Sansa asked, her voice sounding like that of a child.

“There is no time,” her mother said, suddenly harsh. They stood facing each other, the darkening sky roiling above. “Winter is coming.”

In a deafening rush, the glass gardens were gone. Her mother was gone. Sansa fell to her knees in the snow below her. It could have been the depth of two hands or two men, should could not tell. Snow and ice swirled all around her, the only light coming from the half-formed moon above. She stumbled forward half-blind, her skirts dampening to the weight of chainmail. A frantic panic rose up in her chest.

Shaggydog bounded forward from somewhere behind her, and she had no other way than to run after him, trying to keep up. She would be safe with her brother, she thought. Her shoes sunk down in the snow with each lunge. Her feet and ankles needled with pain, and then went numb altogether. Shaggy was long gone, but she could hear him howling in the distance. If only she could reach him--

Then she was running faster and faster, not sinking into the snow but instead sailing across it. She could see Shaggy again, and she yipped at him to slow down so she could run with him. Ancient trees were flashes in the corners of her vision. The snow was nothing, the cold was nothing. She felt a joy in her the likes of which she had never felt. Her body felt powerful beneath her for the first time in her life; she ran with a fierce and terrifying abandon to match such a body.

The gates of Winterfell rose above her. She ran through them at an impossible speed, and then she was tumbling to the ground in the courtyard, back in her frail human form, her pale, bony legs and arms crashing together in a pathetic heap. _No,_ she meant to scream, but it came out in a hoarse, forced whisper. _No, no, no, no, no…_

Her people stood looking down upon her, some mouths agape, some faces crinkled in disgust. They looked down upon their leader, their Lady of Winterfell. On her knees before the crowd, the wind rose up to whip her like the flat of a sword. _A bloodline eight thousand years old,_ screamed the wind, _and you are what’s left._

Palms in the snow, she gave up and let the sobs take her body like great waves at sea.

Strong hands hooked under her arms and lifted her like a child, and for a moment she hoped, prayed, for her father. But he was dead, and this was his legacy.

“Enough,” growled a voice behind her. Her eyes closed in blissful relief. The Hound would not let them hurt her.

She woke with a desperate gasp, her chest heaving, her head pounding. The fire had been lit for her, but she was cold, so cold. She flew violently from her bed, took her cloak from the back of a chair, and huddled beneath it on the floor near the fire. She took great, noisy breaths, trying to calm herself into a normal pattern. She was a fool to think she could do this. She was a sweet, beautiful little fool, as she had always been. She felt the cool gray stones beneath her—she splayed her palms out wide in front of her, trying to ground herself. The stones betrayed her. Instead of infusing her with strength, they sneered at her.

It was not quite morning, but what choice did she have? She never wanted to sleep again, not for a thousand years. She would properly dress herself later, when her maid came in. For now, she donned enough clothing to make herself presentable and left her chambers. She thought about going to the kitchens, but she did not wish to speak with anyone just yet. She had calmed, but there was a nagging terror clinging to her, and she did not feel like herself.

Sansa paced the castle in a wandering fashion, nodding pleasantly at the occasional maid or guard returning from night duty. She found herself on a stairway to a lower level of the castle, a place where mostly food and wine is stored. The storerooms were always cold and deserted and quiet. She knew she should not go alone, but sometimes she could not help herself. Besides, the lady of the castle ought to keep an eye on such things.

Lost in thoughts of ale and pickles, she almost bumped flush into Sandor Clegane. He was the one coming up the stairs, but she was the one who stumbled backward, until he caught her with a firm grasp behind her elbow. She was startled out of her skin and embarrassed, and she did not wish to see him so soon after _dreaming_ about him. They stared at each other for an awkward moment.

“I was just taking a walk around,” she said. “I had a—I could not sleep.” She realized too late that there was no need for her to make excuses, especially not to him. With her standing a step above, they were more of a height. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“Walking, like you,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning against the curved stone wall.

“Do you have nightmares?” she asked.

He nodded. “I sleep poorly. When I do sleep.”

“Is that why you used to drink so much?” she asked. She would have been abashed at her own rudeness, but he never seemed to mind, which was fortunate because she could not keep her tongue in check. He huffed a laugh, and the good side was smiling. She used to think his smile was terrible, but how could a smile be terrible? He could not help it, anyway.

“One of the reasons,” he mumbled.

“You don’t drink very much anymore.”

“No. Might be there are better things to do. Haven’t found any yet, though.”

She laughed. She never noticed before that he was funny.

“Well,” she said, “My maid will attend me soon. I should wander back.”

“I’ll walk with you, if you want.”

“Oh, you do not have to. If your leg pains you.”

“It doesn’t now,” he said, pushing himself off the wall.

At the top of the stairs, she took his arm once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all who leave encouraging words. This is so new to me that I feel like I'm stabbing blindly at something in a dark room. Comments help because I get a gauge of how things are being received/interpreted. Thank you so much.


	4. Chapter 4

Sandor taught Rickon how to hold a sword properly. He told him that if he were doing it right, his sword would feel like a part of his arm instead of a separate piece. The young wolf took to carrying his wooden sword everywhere, jabbing and slashing at tapestries and invisible foes, laughing all the while. Sansa was disturbed by this practice—the way he behaved when he was excited was unorthodox, and people looked at him strangely. Sandor said that he would learn how to blend in eventually. She hoped he was right.

The first day that the former Lannister mongrel trained the Lord of Winterfell himself in the small yard cleared of snow, heads turned and whispers flew. Sansa had yet to formally address his arrival and position: she had waited to see how he would handle it, and had hoped she wouldn't have to say anything at all. Sandor, it seemed, had a knack for avoiding offense with smallfolk and highborns alike. He appeared when he could be useful, and otherwise kept himself scarce. That was something the people of the north would take no issue with. She was no fool: she knew that many of the new smallfolk could be wildlings, or escapees from the war, or even deserters of the Night's Watch, for all she knew. Most were surviving in any way they could. It was understood.

Sansa had confided in both Maester Haywyn and Winterfell's master of arms that Sandor was guilty of years of Lannister service and the actions of any other man of war, but was innocent of Saltpans and any comparison to his monstrous brother. She had emphasized that she owed him a debt, a blood debt, for keeping her alive on several occasions in King's Landing, where without him she may have been killed or worse. For Sansa’s part, she knew she was far too familiar with him, but she knew him better than any other person left at Winterfell, her own flesh and blood included.

By the third and fourth day of practice, they had amassed a small audience. The men would stop by and shout an encouragement or critique to the boy, and he would beam and laugh terribly. Sansa did not always understand the ways of men, but they all seemed happy, and so she herself was happy.

Letters came from holdfasts in the north, from the Night’s Watch, from King’s Landing, from all the war-ravaged realms. There would be peace—brief, sweet peace—for who was left alive to fight? Point to anywhere on a map, and there would be a loss of young men, food, and horses, or a political upheaval, or regular poverty. No one would be going to war, except those who would fight the cold ones. Everyone wished to lick their wounds in solitude, and live to plot another day. Most importantly, no one would be fool enough to march on Winterfell after the snows began.

She was no mother, and she was no King’s Hand, but she tried. Every day, she made Rickon sit with her after breakfast, and they would go over the affairs. She would read him any messages they had received, explain to him how they would respond and why, and have him sign his best rendition of a signature after she wrote out the response in perfect lettering. They would discuss household goings-on, no matter how dull. Every few days, they would hold an audience so that any grievances could be cleared. All of these matters Rickon handled relatively well—but then there were his lessons with Maester Haywyn.

Rickon could not read, nor could he write. That was unusual for a boy of his age and status, and his behavior set him back further. His signature had been taught to him the way a drawing is taught: he could recreate letters, but he could not find their sounds or meanings. All attempts to teach him were met with rage and attempts to escape.

“Rickon,” said Sansa, “You _must_ do the lessons. I know you do not want to, but there is no other way. When you finish we can go see Shaggy--”

“I can’t _do_ it, Sansa. I want to _leave,”_ he said through clenched teeth, his hands shaking.

“You cannot expect to understand it straight away. It takes time,” she said.

Sandor Clegane stood near the wall behind her, watching. The Maester wrung his hands in the corner, occasionally making himself busy with fluffing his various papers and books.

Her brother started pacing back and forth in the small space then, and she knew all was lost. He moved his head side to side, chewing on his cheek, barely able to maintain control. “I want to leave,” he said. “I want to leave.”

“Leave to where? You may go if you wish,” she said, giving up for the day, and moving out of the path of the door.

He cleared the table in front of him with a swoop of his arm, then kicked at the rubble on the ground. “I do not want to go to my chambers, I do not want to go to the Godswood, I want to _leave!_ ” he yelled. “I want to go back to Skagos.” He was taking great, heaving breaths like a blown animal.

She reached a hand out to him, then thought better and let it drop. He would not be consoled.

“Don’t just look at me, Sansa, tell me why! Tell me why I can’t go!” he all but screamed.

She had no answers she could give him in that moment. He did scream then, the sound terrible and primal. The Maester put his hands to his head and then started fluttering anew. She turned around to look at Sandor, half apologizing. She was suddenly ashamed.

He emerged from the perimeter of the room and approached Rickon, who stopped thrashing around and eyed him warily. “Come on, boy,” said Sandor. “You’re giving your Maester a fright.”

“I don’t care,” Rickon said, “They’re all scared of me. I want to leave!” he yelled, leaning forward, his neck straining.

“Come on, then,” said Sandor, picking the boy up and slinging him over one shoulder like a grain sack.

Rickon screamed and thrashed with all his might, and beat upon Sandor’s back, but it was no use. Sansa was suddenly frightened, and she struggled to keep up with his long strides as he left the room and turned down the hall. He toed open the door to an unused bedchamber and strode in, plopping Rickon down on a mattress. Sansa came in right behind him, but he stretched out an arm to keep her back.

“Alright,” said Sandor. “Go ahead.”

“Go ahead and what? Go ahead and _what?”_ screamed Rickon, thrashing off of the mattress then turning round to pummel it. “Go ahead and _what?”_ he repeated, over and over, gone mad. He kicked over a stand and water basin, ripped a hanging from the wall. He started pacing back and forth again in the small space, fisting his hair, breathing as though he were trying to scream but he was all out of voice.

Sansa could not bear watching him come undone. She looked frantically between Rickon and Sandor. The large man stood beside her, still as a statue, watching her brother’s madness calmly, almost sadly. What was that in his eyes? Pity? Recognition?

As suddenly as he had began, Rickon stopped pacing. He stood in the center of the room, fists still in his hair, still breathing hard. His body was straight and stiff as a board, and then it suddenly fell in. Slow-building sobs came forth from his ribcage and stomach, and Sansa’s heart broke. He collapsed to the floor, holding his head in his hands, crying like the little babe that he truly was but was not allowed to be.

After a moment, a strong hand squeezed her shoulder and then nudged her forward. She eased across floor toward Rickon, not wanting to startle him. When she reached him, she grasped her skirts and folded herself onto the carpet near him. She rubbed his arms and shoulders, and then pulled at them, gently but insistently. Finally, he relinquished, letting her fold him into her bosom and hold him like he should have been held by his mother.

He cried until he was all dried out, and yet he stayed in her lap. She stroked his back and his hair, feeling at a loss for how to help him, but feeling relieved that she could finally hold her little brother the way she had wanted to since he was returned to her. She recognized the sweet exhaustion that a good cry will give a person, and met Sandor’s eyes across the room. “Will you take him?” she mouthed.

He moved quietly toward the two bodies in a heap of skirts on the floor. Much to Sansa’s shock, when he came near enough, Rickon stirred, turned, and held his arms up to be taken. Sandor hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment, before he reached down and took him, laying him against his shoulder like a boy of two instead of a boy of nearly nine. He carried him silently through the corridors, Sansa on his heels, until he reached Rickon’s room. By then, his charge was on the verge of sleep. Sansa went before them, opened the door, and turned down the bed. She sat with her brother after Sandor laid him down, holding one of his ankles and rubbing soothing circles with her thumb. Sandor stared down at them for a moment, his expression unreadable. He took two steps back, nodded his goodbye, and quietly turned on his heel and left.

Sansa watched her brother drift off to sleep, and prayed to the gods that all he had needed was release.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hmm, still with me? Thanks for reading. :)


	5. Chapter 5

When Rickon wasn't needed for some duty or another, Sandor was with him. Her brother was not exactly cured after that day in the bedchamber, but his tantrums were less violent and less frequent.

Sansa stole away to watch them in the training yard. Most of the time, Rickon landed blows to a straw knight, while Sandor corrected his posture or technique. Sometimes Sandor circled him with a wooden sword, lazily jabbing at him so he could practice blocking blows. Some days, the weather did not permit, so they walked around the castle, Rickon excitedly listening to any slivers of stories that Sandor saw fit to give.

Sansa did not push the issue of the lessons for the time being.

At dinner, the remaining Starks continued the practice of inviting someone to their table each night. Winterfell was nowhere near as populated as it had once been, so it seemed silly to eat with the same people in rotation, but they did it nonetheless. There were few who filled official positions: Sansa and the Master performed many functions out of necessity.

Sandor insisted it was a bad idea for him to eat at table with them, despite Rickon's begging. He sat at a lower table with the master at arms on most days. Sansa would look at him more often than she should, and often find him staring. He would hold her gaze evenly, even though he had been caught.

She followed him from the Great Hall one evening.

She did not know where he might be, so she wandered her usual route as she did when sleep would not visit. It took her through a maze of halls and corridors, but he was nowhere to be found. She knew that he trained with the other men, and he had a hand in tending the horses, but it was too late and too cold for either of those things. _He might very well be a ghost,_ she thought, _and I have lost my wits._

The next day, she woke with a fever and needles in her throat.

"We need more fruit. That is what we need. Fevers and colds to be had by all..." Haywyn muttered into the mixture of herbs and flavors he was mixing for tea.

"Nothing is growing?" she asked.

"Not yet, my lady, but take heart. The process is slower when done artificially."

The glass gardens had taken great damage. Very recently, they had salvaged whatever glass was not broken and had created a much smaller, pieced together garden, with glass on the top and part way down the sides, but aided by temporary walls here and there. They had potatoes and onions growing in cellars, herbs growing in windows, and salt meats hanging in cold rooms. They had stores of ale and pickled foods from the Vale. They had animals that could yet be slaughtered, and the forest was not yet picked clean. There was hope, but Sansa fretted day and night. She took as small of portions as she could get away with, and her figure showed the difference, but there was nothing to be done for it.

She cursed herself, though, for her thoughtlessness. She had tried to eat less so not to be wasteful, but she had gone too far and made herself sick. And now there would be nothing accomplished.

"Rest, my lady," said the Master good naturedly. "The castle will not fall to pieces in a day or two. I will send something hearty for you to eat."

Sansa brought the steaming tea to her lips and took the tiniest of sips so she did not burn herself.

 

+

 

A knock sounded twice upon the door. Mara had brought her some soup.

"Come in!" she chirped, her voice much improved with the honeyed tea.

A hulking body filled the doorframe, apparently not her maid. She quickly discarded her teacup on the bedside table, straightened herself against the headboard, and draped her long hair over one shoulder. Even after fixing herself, she must have been a fright.

"Stop lurking, Sandor. I am hungry," she said.

"Apologies, _my lady,_ " he mocked, but there was no venom in his voice.

He approached the foot of her bed, holding a food tray decorated with little painted roses around the sides. He held the handles meant for a full hand with two fingers and a thumb. She could not help but giggle at him, but she immediately regretted it when her head set to pounding.

"What have you done to earn kitchen duty?" she said.

"I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, like usual," he said. He walked around to where she was sitting and gingerly placed the tray on her lap. The cook had sent her leek and potato soup, thickened with flour and dashed with pepper, and a large, hot roll with butter and honey.

"I hope you don't make it a habit," said Sansa. "Or I will have to sew the largest kitchen apron ever made."

"Only if you make it as red as your nose," he said, smirking.

"Leave me be. I cannot help it, I am ill. And besides, red has never been your color." She was referring to that hideous tunic he used to wear in King's Landing, but she realized after she said it that it described his former masters as well. Her spoon paused midway to her lips. She hoped she had not offended him. She met his eyes, and found something unfamiliar there.

"Would you stay for a small while? I'm very bored today," she said, before resuming her spoonful of soup. He looked around the bed awkwardly. There was no chair.

"No, sit here." She pointed to the area near her feet, "Sit with me. Please," she added, remembering her courtesies.

He did sit with her, but not before crossing to the other side of her bed and easing himself down to face her on the corner opposite her feet. She supposed it was only proper.

"Does your leg pain you overmuch?" she asked, noticing the tension in his body.

"I'm used to it now," he said.

She frowned. "That is not an answer."

"It pains me, but not overmuch," he relinquished.

"If training with Rickon aggravates it too much, I can tell him to stop bothering you."

"No," he said. "The movement helps."

"Oh. I see," she said, offering a small, sweet smile. They lapsed into silence then, as they often did, but it was not an anxious silence. Sansa had quite her fill of those in her years of waiting for others to decide her fate. "Where is Rickon today, anyway?" She asked after a moment.

"My shadow went to lessons with the Maester without me. He wanted me to go, but I told him I already know how to read. Then he didn't believe me, little shit.” Sansa laughed with her hand over her mouth. She could not believe that Rickon went willingly at all, and picturing that conversation gave her joy.

"Well, _do_ you know how to read?" she asked, genuinely curious.

"Yes. I had a Maester, too, remember?" He said, leaning back against the bedpost, one leg bent across the bed and the other resting on the floor.

"I remember. The way you spoke of him made me think he was not…effective."

He laughed darkly. "Depends on who you ask." Her eyes glimmered with fever, making the task of looking at him more difficult, but she would not look away.

"He wouldn't give me any milk of the poppy, after," he said, and she knew immediately what he was referring to. "He did at first, but then not anymore. It was for Gregor's headaches, and we didn't have enough." She did not bother to filter her horror. He said it almost nonchalantly, with only a hint of bitterness.

"How did you _live_?" she wondered aloud.

"I don't know. I don't think I was meant to," he said. "But I did, whatever it's worth."

"It is worth a great deal to me," she said immediately.

There was no lie in it. She could but imagine how he had suffered in all the years of his life, and in her eyes, he did not deserve it. He was cursed from infancy. What person could survive such a life, such a family, and emerge with mind and body intact? She thought of Rickon and a shiver ran up her spine.

His eyes dug into her with all the sharpness of steel, but he said nothing.

Her head was pounding and her mouth was dry. She felt the fever as a dull ache in her joints, the discomfort of her nightshift rubbing against her flushed skin. She set the tray aside, the remaining food long-abandoned.

"Forgive me, but I think I must lie down," she said.

He all but jumped off of the bed, his earlier ease forgotten. "I shouldn't have stayed so long," he said.

"No, I am glad you did," she said, smiling weakly. "Could you send Maester Haywyn to me?"

He nodded, turned, and walked toward the bedchamber door. He still said goodbye as though he were being dismissed. He reached the door and grabbed the handle, but did not open it. After a pause, he turned around halfway. "I could come back tomorrow," he said. "Rickon might go to his lessons again. I could bring what the cook sends, if it please you."

She did not know whether to cry for his childlike hopefulness, or laugh at an _if it please you_ from Sandor Clegane. Perhaps she was delirious.

"Of course," she nearly croaked, glad to have some company in advance.

When the door closed behind him, she sank down in the bed, wanting to whimper at how much it hurt. The feeling of misery came over her so suddenly that she began to worry in earnest, but she told herself it was only a chill and she was being foolish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little update of little consequence. I hope you still enjoy it. Thank you for reading and leaving comments--it's like fertilizer for the soul. :)


	6. Chapter 6

In the end, it was not only a chill, but a severe sickness. Sansa recovered in a matter of days, but others were not so lucky. The destruction was limited among those who lived in the castle itself, but the smallfolk in Wintertown lost several children and old ones as the infection spread. Maester Haywyn had been trained in ways to contain an outbreak at the Citadel: he wrapped a cloth around his face and went around distributing vinegar and small blocks of tallow soap, ordering those who were ill to stay confined. He tended to anyone who would allow it, but many distrusted Maesters, preferring instead to rely on their own remedies and treatments. Sansa finally realized just how many wildlings had fled the far north and settled at Winterfell.

Rickon did not fall ill, and for that she thanked the gods. Despite his other deficits, he was a very physically hardy child. She could not have handled another Sweetrobin.

As the sickness spread and the snow and ice settled in layers, they were increasingly confined indoors. Just when she thought Rickon would go mad, Sandor suggested that they move aside a few tables in the Great Hall so the boy could get some exercise. Winterfell’s men at arms, accompanied by Rickon and Sandor, would swing at each other laughingly for a couple of hours each day, and then the tables would be moved back in time for dinner.

Dinner would be a modest affair, but still filling. Their stores were holding well, monitored to the last drop of ale by Sansa herself. Her time in the Vale under Petyr’s wing had not been meaningless, but she rather wished he would have taught her how to keep numbers and run a castle without all of the _additional_ instruction he had seen fit to give. For that, and for his hand in her family’s downfall, she would forever curse him.

She told Sandor about Petyr’s fondles and unwanted kisses. It just slipped out one day, as they were surveying the state of the horses and stables. They had begun a sort of game since he told her about his childhood Maester: a secret for a secret, a confession for a confession. Up to that point, Sandor had been far more generous than she, seemingly willing to answer any question she had for him. Sansa’s own confessions had been more or less trivial. They were things of no real consequence, or things he probably could have inferred on his own. Despite this, he drank of her words, always giving his full and unrivaled attention. She wondered if anyone besides him had ever given such weight to her chirping.

His hand had stilled on Stranger’s neck, his face briefly contorted in rage. “Who had the honor of removing his head?” he asked.

"Norrin, one of the men at arms,” she replied. “I was supposed to do it myself, but I could not. I cannot even lift a sword, and any other way would not have been clean.”

“He didn’t deserve clean,” Sandor said. “You should have poked him with a carving knife until he bled out from a thousand holes.”

Feeling vindicated, she allowed herself to picture his suggestion, taking more pleasure in it that she should have. She would have never done anything of the sort—she was not without mercy—but she admitted that Petyr had deserved to suffer at her hands, and she had only him killed quickly to spare herself pain. She had been hardened, but she was not brutal. She never would be.

"The Elder Brother is the one who warned me about him. Indirectly, of course," she said.

"I know," he said. "I wanted to go with Meribald when he went to find you."

"Why didn't you?"

“There was my leg. It wasn’t fully healed yet. I would have ended up lamer than I already am.” She rolled her eyes on the other side of Stranger’s neck, where he couldn’t see. He was hardly lame at all.

“I wouldn’t have been able to leave you in your cage a second time,” he said. “I would have gotten us both killed.” She didn’t let herself think about that.

“I am glad you didn’t come to the Gates of the Moon. I was not ready to see you again.” At that he looked resigned, even chastised. After one last tug to Stranger’s blanket, he gestured that they should leave the stables. Sansa had chosen one of the men to be the master of horse and he had begun his duties, but she knew Sandor fretted over Stranger as though he were a suckling babe instead of a warhorse.

“I had myself convinced that you had kissed me.”

He stopped abruptly and peered down at her. “What?” he said hoarsely.

“I imagined a kiss, the night of the Blackwater,” she peeped, hand still resting in the crook of his elbow. “I know that is not how it happened. I know that now. But I imagined that it did…”

“Why?” he demanded.

“I misremember things. Sometimes I think I am half mad,” she said. “And I was frightened. You frightened me.”

He only clenched his jaw.

“I dreamed of you when I was in the Eyrie. I dreamed of you in the place of my husband."

"Why?" he asked again.

"Because I wanted you, though I was too young to know why or what for." Her heart started pounding as soon as the last of her tumbling words reached the open air, but she had danced around this for far too long.

It had begun when she was only a foolish girl, but now she was a woman with all the accompanying wants and desires. The greatest of these were the right to choose, and the right to be chosen for herself and herself alone. Sandor Clegane was many things, but he was not false, and here, the nights were long and dark. They might not survive the winter.

A small body burst into the stable, bringing a gust of unforgivingly cold wind with him. "Sandor!" Rickon called, out of breath. "Where have you been? We moved all the tables. Come on!" The boy grabbed his hand and began tugging fruitlessly.

Sansa stood stock-still, stunned at both the sudden intrusion and her brother's demeanor. It was as though he was an entirely different child.

She met Sandor’s eyes. He looked at her for only a second, his mouth twitching, before he let himself be dragged away. Sansa stood alone at the end of the row of stables, wind whipping around her skirts, tears stinging behind her eyes like bees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know, Sansa can't catch a break... Some things are just important even though they aren't fun. Eeeeeek don't hate me


	7. Chapter 7

She did not go to the cellar. She did not go to the training yard, nor to the Great Hall, whichever was being used on whichever day. She did not go wandering around. She felt as though she had run at full speed toward a stone wall, and only at the last second realized what she had done.

What had she done?

Sansa did not know what had possessed her to say those things to him, what had possessed her to _touch_ him all those times. It was all so despairingly wrong. Even though she tried, she tried so hard, she still did everything wrong.

And now she had a shadow stalking around in her castle, a shadow that clung to her and would not shake loose. She did not see him, but she knew he was there, and that was her undoing. How stupid she had been to think she could set up a room for a ghost from her past, invite him to sit before her hearth. It all came back, pushing into her mind all at once. She dreamed things she had not dreamed in years—of heads rolling, of hands grabbing, of throats closing.

After some days, her hands shook and she felt weak all the time, and she half thought to send Sandor Clegane into the snows. She half thought that she could toss him out, get rid of him, and all would go back to the way it was. But she knew it wasn’t him, it was her past that haunted her. He was just a walking reminder, a point of entry, a weakness. And if she sent him away, her brother would not survive. She knew that in her bones.

Sansa’s figures were kept neat, her supplies stocked. Her chambers were immaculate. Her hair was clean, brushed and oiled until it shone like fire, and braided in the northern style. Winterfell was a living thing, an animal body, all parts and pieces moving and dancing together to keep life and heat. All was in order, except for her soul. She spoke honeyed words to herself, saying she was only upset, and it would all get better. She grew more silent as the days grew darker. Winter had come for her.

“Sansa,” said Rickon, “What’s wrong with you?”

The dim glow of candlelight made her brother’s face look so young and pure. She heaved a sigh as she finished laying out his clothes for the next day. “That wasn’t a very polite thing to ask,” she said, her voice sounding far away.

“I figure you’re my sister so it doesn’t matter,” said the boy. He was lying in his too-large bed, already tucked in.

“You have a point,” she said, “but there’s nothing wrong with me. There’s no need for you to worry about things like that.”

Rickon lapsed into silence, wriggling down into his mattress like a worm. He was never still, not until the very last second before sleep dragged him down. A wolf howled in the distance. The creature was as restless as his charge.

Sansa had decided Shaggydog would be released from the Godswood. She, Sandor, and Rickon had walked him to the edge of the forest and let him off his lead. Rickon had been crying, his tears nearly freezing to his cherry-red cheeks. Sandor told him it was cruel to lock a wolf in the Godswood because he couldn’t hunt. It was getting colder and harsher, and he would need to do what wolves do to survive. Maybe he would even find a pack. After that, Rickon had stopped crying, but his chin still trembled. He told Shaggy to go, and he did. That was the last time she had seen Shaggydog in days, as well as the last time she had seen Sandor Clegane, yet she sensed them both prowling around. She knew she could not hide forever.

She kissed Rickon on the forehead despite his wriggling. Like every night, she asked how many candles he wanted left burning, and like every night, he said he wanted two. He always wanted two candles in the room while he slept, kept apart from each other, so just in case one went out there would be another. Sometimes it made her sad—they were all miserable broken things dancing around one another’s tragedies and fears. She left the candles burning anyway.

She left Rickon’s chambers feeling like the weight of the seven kingdoms was pressing down on her. Her shoulders sagged and her feet shuffled along without purpose. These moments in dark corridors crept up on her: they were moments when there was nobody around to fool except herself, but she just couldn’t find the will to do it.

A shadow appeared silently beside her, long strides moving at the slowest pace to match her footfalls. She wasn’t afraid: she knew who it was. She knew he would come, eventually.

“Beg pardon,” she began. “I should not have—“

He shook his head, and she trailed off. Still in step with her, he took her hand and placed it at his elbow, leading her to her chambers. There was no reason for it—she was quite safe, and it was a short walk. She recognized it for what it was: a truce, an acceptance. And just like that, they were back where they started, doing as they always had done. She felt like a fool for being so upset. Of course he would not fault her. He never did, not truly.

She wanted to know what he thought. Sometimes she wished for one of his drunken tirades of what he thought to be truth, just so she would know where she stood. She wanted to know if he had ever missed her, had ever thought about her or talked about her. She wanted to know if he ever took himself in hand thinking of her, but she did not often let herself follow that thought.

“Thank you,” she said, coming to a stop in front of her chamber doors. Suddenly he was gone from her side and moving to open the door, and she was so cold. She tried not to shiver.

“Goodnight, little bird,” said the shadow behind her. She stopped short just inside her rooms, the door softly settling into its frame behind her.

 

+

 

The winter storm lasted days. Ropes were strung between buildings, fires lit in the stables, and dogs and children were counted throughout the day. Everyone took shelter indoors. Some smallfolk elected to say in their buildings and huts; some begged shelter inside the walls of Winterfell and were allowed.

Sansa knew only fear. Of what, she could not say. As always, everything had been accounted for, prepared for, and yet she was not at ease.

Wolves howled in the dark outside, for there was now no distinction between night and day. It seemed Shaggy had found a pack. The thought might have further frightened some, but it made Sansa rest a bit easier.

She ordered hot cider with spices to go along with dinners that were mostly soup and bread. They still had plenty of stores, but soup was a conservative food that didn’t use much, so she took advantage of the unusual chill and served it throughout the storm. Then she fretted about people hating her for soup, of all things. They must be tired of it, she decided. The next day she would think of something different.

At dinner on the seventh day, they had meat pies to go with their bread and soup. It was not the finest of dinners, but the people were happy, and it used the scraps of meat they could not use for other things. They all sat huddled together close to conserve heat and candles. Sansa thought it looked more like the lower decks of a ship than the Great Hall of Winterfell. The tone was hushed. People muttered lowly or did not speak at all. It made Sansa nervous—she had expected a raucous, for who would not get restless when stuck inside for days on end? It turned out to be the opposite. People scattered about here and there, performing whatever duties they could find for themselves, but all sounds were muffled, like a great velvet curtain had been thrown over them all.

_That is what snow does_ , she thought. They were enclosed in a tomb of ice. She could not bear the whispers—it reminded her of the venomous silence of a court far away.

Even Rickon was subdued. Sandor had asked him if he wanted to practice fighting in the near-dark several days in a row, but Rickon had morosely declined. Sandor spent the days finding tasks for himself or just wandering around the castle. He told Rickon that the boy ought to know every corner and corridor of his home so well that he could walk, run, or fight in the dark just by memory. After that, Rickon wandered with him, but he was without his usual energy. They made Sansa anxious, just pacing around in the dark like caged animals, but she supposed neither one of them could stand inaction. She almost wanted to pace around with them, but there was some invisible barrier she felt she could not cross.

She passed them while going about her daily tasks. She would draw her eyes up and down her brother’s lithe form, noticing the slump in his shoulders and the clench in his jaw. He was gnawing at something, or something was gnawing at him. She would look into Sandor’s eyes and see an agreement, but no answers. Rickon was fond of his secrets.

“You don’t give yours up so easy, either,” Sandor told her that night, and she had to admit it was the truth.

“There are things I cannot speak of yet,” she said, knowing that he knew that already. Sandor shrugged.

“It’s the same for him,” he said. “Might be he never tells you.”

“I know,” she said.

They were sitting by the fire in the kitchens. Sansa sat on a chair, and Sandor sat on an upturned barrel of something or other. The cooks and servants had gone to bed, preparing to wake early the next day.

“You fret too much,” he said levelly. She knew her eyes were dark, and her skin was dull.

“What do you recommend?” she japed. The good corner of his mouth pulled up. “What?” she asked. “Don’t say wine.”

“No, not wine. You could try that tea the Maesters make. The one with the flowers,” he said. “The one that tastes like dirt.” She had to laugh at that one.

“The Elder Brother?” she asked.

“Who else?”

“I think I should like to meet your Elder Brother,” she said.

“Careful what you wish for,” he replied.

“Oh… I did not mean—“

“A jape, little bird,” he amended. A blush spread up to her cheeks. His smile fell, and he grew serious once more. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” she said quickly—too quickly. But a dog could smell a lie, and this was not one. “Are you afraid of me?” escaped her lips before she could think better of it. He looked at her a long time, still as stone, with firelight flickering off the mottled terrain of his face.

“Yes.”

 She didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything. She just nodded, shrugged her shawl back up around her shoulders from where it had fallen, and looked at him. She could talk to him about matters of life and death with the same comfort she could talk to Maester Haywyn about herbs. Perhaps it was the thought of the Maester and his herbs that made her yawn.

“Shall I carry you to bed again, _my lady_?” he asked. She was quite tempted to say yes.

“You may walk with me, if you wish.”

They stopped in front of her chamber doors, as they often did. He hesitated, as he often did. _Do it_ , she would think. _Do whatever it is you’re thinking of doing_. He never did. He never would.

Sansa did not let that bother her very long. Mara was there waiting for her. With the help of her maid, Sansa slipped out of her layers of wool and linen. Mara poked her in the ribs and clucked disapprovingly. For once, she did not make excuses. She would simply have to eat more, and there was nothing else to it.

Her bed was warm and safe, and her body took its first good rest in days.

 

+

 

“Lady Sansa? Beg pardon, but please wake up.”

The morning was sharp and crisp-cold. She was not ready. There was something softly shaking her shoulder—a woman. Mara.

“My lady, there are smallfolk here to see you,” Mara whispered forcibly, and that got her attention.

“What?” Sansa asked. “What has happened?”

“Some are gone. Some are missing,” the maid nearly hissed, moving to the wardrobe to fetch a dress and stockings. Sansa sat straight up and began climbing out of her mountains of furs. She did not understand. She was not ready. “Old ones?” she asked, terrified of the answer.

“ _Children_ ,” said Mara.

_Gods help me._ Sansa flew from bed. She threw on her dress and her stockings and her boots, and all but sprinted from her chambers. Closer to the hall in which she held court, she forced herself to walk, pushing down the retching feeling in her chest. Too late, she realized she forgot to get Rickon.

Norrin stood before the great double doors. His face held a warning. If she had been herself, she may have sobbed right then, but she locked her lips and cheeks and strode into the hall.

The room hushed. Thirty or so people were in the small hall, mostly men. She saw a handful of women, probably wildings from the way they carried themselves. She nodded once in greeting and proceeded to her chair. It was no throne: it was stepped, but only enough to put her at a tall man’s height when seated. It was wooden, and unadorned. She did not want to sit a throne.

“What has happened?” she asked to the stones and the rafters, to the windows and the tapestries. Her voice echoed through the room, filling the space.

One man stepped forward.

“What is your name?” she asked, rushing through the introduction.

“My name is Gret, m’lady,” said the man with a humble authority. He would be a leader of sorts among the smallfolk; a respected man. He had that air about him.

“For whom do you speak?”

“All.” Sansa nodded. He was to continue.

“We’ve lost seventeen. Seventeen of our children. We lost a babe so young he didn’t yet have a name.” Sansa’s stomach somersaulted. _A babe in arms._ She hoped he would say it so she did not have to ask. She could not bear to draw it out of him.

“It was _them,_ ” he said, and the room was aflame. One of the women began silently sobbing. Men nodded fervently, rage and fear in their eyes, looking back and forth between their lady and each other. There were mumbles and curses, and men yelled _it was them, it was the Others._ It was too much for her. It was all falling apart, all slipping away like silt through the cracks between her fingers. She closed her eyes, felt the back of her head hit the wood behind her. _So this is how the north will end: the blind leading the crippled._

“Silence,” she said.

The moment stretched on. She was aware that it was stretching on too long, but she could not think. She knew nothing of the things that lurked in the cold, nothing at all save for the tales Old Nan had told her about wights and ice spiders and swords made of sorcery and crystal—nightmares, all. Nightmares suddenly made real.

“Bring me whoever knows the most about these creatures. Bring me the oldest, or someone who has seen them.”

She knew what she risked. The smallfolk needed to respect their leader, even fear their leader, but she could not claim that she knew the way, not when the winds of winter howled and a summer child sat the dais. Even now they looked at her and knew what she was—a lone wolf, a false wolf, without instinct or pack, holding court in the place of a puppy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to picture EB and Sandor getting into arguments about little birds and chamomile tea.


	8. Chapter 8

She sent men to cut back the forest. They were to take shifts, and very short ones at that. The weather was brutal. She could not lose any more to sickness, and they wanted to keep their fingers and toes.

She sent them to hack away at tree trunks, to collect twigs and boughs, to find anything that would be useful. The snows were so deep that when they melted, she knew the severed trunks would still stand half the height of a man or more.

They needed more fire. If they were to have more fire, they needed more wood. With the forest line pushed back here and there, there would be more time to see anything approaching. Whether that was comforting or terrifying, Sansa could not decide.

The old wildling man had brought her more questions than answers. Did they come when it was cold, or did the cold come with them? Did they come when it was night, or did the night come with them? The man told her that fire seemed to repel them, but if they truly wanted to go somewhere, their frost could strangle the flames. He said you could kill a wight with steel, but those were only thralls—they were only things raised from the dead. If a man faced one of the Cold Ones, one of the Others, his body’s own wetness would freeze in his lungs and his sword would shatter like common ice. Only dragonglass could kill them, or maybe Valyrian steel, but Sansa had no weapons such as those, if they even existed at all anymore.

So far as she could tell, they were destined to be lost things wriggling in the dark, waiting for their children to be stolen and raised against them. She thought of Old Nan describing how women would smother their children so they would not starve, but perhaps they smothered them so they would not be taken.

More smallfolk decided they wanted to stay within the gates, and she allowed them. There were chambers and quarters and entire corridors left unused. There was the entire guest house, once used for kings and queens but now patched up and occupied by half-starved smallfolk. Even the guardhouse was half-empty. She let the folk make arrangements among themselves and settle where they would. Some elected to stay in Wintertown, but came closer and closer to the walls. They shut off the farthest half of the village, building little fences that only served to keep dogs in and hold torches.

They all ate and worked and rutted and slept among each other. Sansa worried that the lines between the high and the low would blur too much and there would be chaos, but was there any other way? They were like animals huddled together for warmth. Ravens stopped coming, and they could have been written off by the realms of men for all she knew. The last had been from the Wall. The night was dark and cold, and full of unnamed terrors, and no one would be coming to save them.

Sansa counted no difference between herself and the lowest beggar, the rowdiest wildling, the most hardened house guard. She, Rickon, the Maester, and very few others with any title or station in the household kept rule and order, but Sansa knew the truth of it: winter would make beggars of them all, and probably killers, too.

It might have been all in her mind, but sometimes that creeping, unnatural cold would rattle through her, telling her the enemy was close, so close. She would begin to despair, but something deep in her bones, something so strong that it frightened her, would whisper to her in quiet moments. _Whatever needs to be done,_ it would say, and she would find her fists clenched into pale knots of will.

 

+

 

Rickon disappeared one clear midmorning.

Maester Haywyn said the boy was with Sandor. Sandor said he hadn’t seen him yet that day. Sansa flew to her brother’s chambers, startling his maid, who said she’d last seen him before breakfast. Within what seemed like seconds, Winterfell was like a swarm of wasps, all with only one purpose. The household staff and the smallfolk began looking without being ordered, buzzing around in groups of two or three, checking here and there. They checked the stables and the guardhouse and the Great Hall. Sandor went down into the crypts, because no one else dared and because Sansa couldn’t stomach it. Even Wintertown, or at least the half of it that was still inhabited, stirred and frenzied for the cause. Sansa could not be still. If she stopped, her horror would catch up to her and sink its claws into her back. She paced the castle, checking the same places and people over and over again. She went to the Godswood and screamed her brother’s name hoarsely into the wind, but she knew he wasn’t there. She knew he was gone.

He had gone into the forest. The wolves were quiet.

They found her with her ankles sunk into the snow, staring with all her might out the Hunter’s Gate.

“Find him,” was all she could say. Any more, and her voice would crack.

A man on horse whipped by her, and then another, and then another. They would search the forest nearby—the forest where the Others lived, and all else died, except Shaggy and his pack of demons. How many men had gone? A dozen? Twenty? It was too many, and it was not enough.

Stranger passed by her near enough to stir the air. Man and horse reigned and turned a few feet in front of her. She thought she saw the Hound, but the sight before her was more frightening. Black horse, black hair, black cloak—against the white snow, he was startling. No anger twisted his features, no rage—only calm. Sandor was well versed in destruction if in nothing else. He looked like death itself, come to collect. She knew that if anyone had harmed her brother, the snow would run red. A shiver raked up from her wet boots to the base of her neck.

“Please,” she said, too quiet for anyone to actually hear, and it may as well have been a prayer to the Stranger.

“Go inside,” he said. His dark shape blurred and creased as the first tears fell from her eyes.

Mara threw a cloak around Sansa’s shoulders, and dragged her away almost violently. She led her back to her chambers, sat her upon her bed, and peeled off all the wet layers crusted with snow. She wrapped her in fresh clothing, checked her feet and hands several times, and generally fussed over everything. All Sansa could do was cry limply, tears falling from her cheeks though the rest of her barely shook.

How many times would she have to be the last Stark?

By the time the men trickled back a couple of hours later, Sansa had done nothing but sit and stare into the fire. She could not move her legs—they were like sacks filled with pitch, all heavy and wobbling.

“I am sorry, m’lady. We found nothing. Not even tracks,” said Norrin. “We can go back out, but we need fresh horses and the men need to warm themselves.”

Sansa only nodded. She could not be the one who made the decision to stop looking. She could not. She stayed by the fire, unmoving. Waiting.

She thought of all the dozens of things that could have happened to him—he could be lying dead in the snow, with blue lips and lungs of stone. He could be taken—there were things in the forest she feared and did not understand, cold things with ice for eyes, and men so desperate they would eat one another with little deliberation. Thinking of that deep forest, the largest in the realm, made silent by sorcery and snow as tall as walls, she felt that a chill was creeping up her body the longer she sat. Suddenly, she could not stay.

A dozen or so men who decided to regroup saddled different horses, if not fresh ones, and made ready to go further than the first time. There were people milling around outside, walking heavily through the snow, gossiping and comparing theories with one another. Sansa gathered her pitch-filled legs and met the search party to send them off, but before she could peep out some excuse for a rousing speech, a horn was heard from atop the gate.

Just as suddenly as he had gone, her brother reappeared, his monstrous black direwolf at his side. He shuffled along sickly, one hand buried in Shaggydog’s scruff.

She should have disciplined him, should have greeted him curtly and taken him to some private room somewhere to deliver his sentence, but so complete was her relief that all she could do was to run to him and fold him in her arms. Shaggy butted his nose against her impatiently, and she noted her brother’s shivering. Her relief disappeared in a black cloud, and she called for someone to fetch the Maester.

 

+

 

In the Maester’s chambers, Rickon sat atop a fur-covered cot, sipping at some the warm cider that Haywyn had seen fit to give. He was near the fire, but not too near—it was dangerous to warm up too quickly. Sansa sat near him, and Shaggy rested at their feet like a regular pet dog. All this over his wolf—all he had wanted was his wolf. Sansa felt she could not hold a grudge against him for that. Even now, all these years later, her gut twisted in agony whenever Lady ran through her thoughts.

She would have to address his running away, as she would have to address Shaggy’s reinstatement at his side. For now, she stroked her brother’s russet curls, savoring them as though they were the finest velvet. There were moments where she let her guard down and let herself love him all the way.

The hours ticked by, and the boy ceased his shivering. His color returned in gradual shades, and he began asking for food. Sansa finally stopped fussing over him, trusting that he would recover well. A young girl from the kitchens brought them a dark loaf of bread, hot broth, and hard cheese, and they ate their modest dinner in silence. Sansa almost broke off a crumble of cheese for Shaggydog to nibble before she remembered herself. Completely uninterested in their dinner, the animal resettled himself across the room, further from the fire.

There was the thud of a fist on the heavy wooden door—once, twice. “Come in!” Sansa began to say, but the hinges groaned and the door swung open before she could finish.

Sandor’s body filled most of the door frame, but his anger filled most of the room, rolling in like a sudden summer storm. Sansa realized he had never come back with the rest of the men. He must have been out for hours—long enough for the falling snow to dampen his hair and clothing. He stood panting as though he’d been running. Water dripped to the floor where he stood.

“Glad to see you’re back safe, _my lord,”_ he said, mouth twitching. His soaked black cloak flicked back, and a boy’s wooden practice sword clattered across the floor toward their feet.

Rickon covered his mouth and looked as though he might cry. Sandor just turned on his heel and left, the door lazily swinging closed behind him.

Whatever had just occurred between them would be the first of the boy’s punishments. There were traps and injuries to be had in the space between boys and men. Rickon’s shoulders shook softly. He kept one hand on his cheek, giving him a look of disbelief. Shaggy’s bright green eyes watched them clearly, and Sansa distantly noted that he had not torn Sandor to shreds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all of you who leave kudos and comments. I keep posting something thinking, "Well, this is a risk, they probably won't like it," and then getting a bunch of great comments telling me otherwise. Thank you.
> 
> PS, when I'm not writing SanSan, I'm writing horror. Can you tell? D:


	9. Chapter 9

The sept was nearly in ruins. Sansa shuffled in tiredly, feeling like an imposter, but also feeling like she had nowhere else to go.

She wanted her mother. She wanted to smell her mother’s skin, nestle herself against the lace of her shift and take comfort as children do. She wanted her father’s stern judgement melting into crinkles around his eyes, and the smell of his leather and wool against her cheek. She wanted Arya’s cold feet against her shins, and all her brothers and their boyish, ridiculous laughter echoing through the halls. She would have to settle for these rotten floorboards, these dusty shrines to gods with no eyes.

There were once a few benches, but they were ripped up and gone. She settled on her knees on the floor, baring herself to the seven sides of the sept. The Maiden looked at her as though she were a stranger, and the Mother surveyed her and found her lacking. She no longer yearned for them, no longer idolized them as she once did. Instead she wished to fall at the feet of the Crone and beg for wisdom, grasp the Stranger’s hands and trade him kisses for secrets, curl herself up behind the Warrior’s knees for protection. More than anything, she wanted the warm, smooth trunk of a weirwood under her palms, but she could not go alone. It was too dark, too cold, and too eerie. Sometimes she looked at those ancient, seeping eyes and wondered if they could truly see.

Her sobs preceded her tears by a few ragged, rattling breaths. _This is how Starks break_ , she thought, _not at all, and then all at once_. She tried to keep herself quiet, but the sounds of her sobbing, however small, echoed off the walls and back into her. She covered her mouth with her hands and rocked forward. As much as she wanted to, she could not let herself cry without abandon. She was afraid that if she ever started, she would never stop.

After, her knees and shins ached, and her eyes and nose were red and leaking, but her head was clear. She had left a thousand worries in a thousand droplets of tears, anointing the floor of the sept like no holy oil ever could.

 

+

 

“I’m sorry, Sansa,” said Rickon. “I thought he would come to me right away, and then we could go back. I didn’t know he went so far into the woods.” The boy was on his back, facing the rafters. Sansa was on her side next to him, with an arm flung over the furs that covered him.

“You should not have gone. You could have died,” she said. She couldn’t tell him it was alright, because it wasn’t, but she refused to make him feel worse than he already did. Her words held no bite.

“I know. I’m sorry,” he said again. “Will you make Shaggy leave again?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she sighed. “As long as he doesn’t hurt anybody, I think we should let him come and go as he pleases. Make it his decision.” Rickon considered that a moment and then nodded.

“He won’t hurt anybody. He doesn’t want to do that anymore.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mhm,” he said, his thumb rubbing circles over the edge of his tunic sleeve, never still. He chewed his bottom lip, still raw and chapped from earlier. “Does Sandor hate me now?”

“No.”

“He acts like he does.”

“You only scared him,” she said.

“I didn’t even use my sword,” Rickon said. “I got scared and dropped it and ran away.”

_That’s how Sandor found it,_ she realized. Terror curled in her stomach. She knew what she would have thought if she had found his little wooden sword lying haphazard on the ground, after hours of looking and praying. Sansa knew the full weight of Sandor’s involvement with her brother—she knew what it meant, and she knew what it took from him. She knew how hard it was to love Rickon. He was a risk. Just like Sweetrobin had been; just like _Joffrey_ must have been at some time, or even Tommen. Sandor was no father, just as Sansa was no mother, but she hoped that between the two of them they could at least keep the boy alive.

 “Don’t lie here and worry about it all night. What’s done is done. All you can do is start again tomorrow,” she said, tucking the furs around him tighter. “Do you want the other candle lit?” she asked. There was only one.

“No,” he said, “I shouldn’t waste candles.”

The sobriety of his answer surprised her, but she would let him brave the dark if that’s what he needed to do. “Goodnight, Rickon,” she said, “I love you.” He did not answer, but she had not thought he would.

 

+

 

She had a purpose on this night. She knew what she wanted and who she wanted it from. Her intentions were innocent enough, she told herself, but she felt something wolfish uncurling inside her. She was not without her plots.

She knew which chamber was his, though she had never entered it. She knocked thrice upon the door. She heard no rustling within, and she almost thought he was not there, but then she remembered that he had been a soldier, and a hunted child besides. He was silent as the space between breaths when he wanted to be.

Finally, the door creaked open. Sandor looked surprised.

“Were you expecting someone else?” she asked.

“Your brother, maybe. But he knocks like a woodpecker,” he said. _He was hoping Rickon would come find him_ , she thought, and her heart broke for them. They had some sorting out to do. “Looking for someone to go wandering with, little bird?”

“No,” she said. “May I come in?”

She saw him swallow hard, but his hand fell from the door and he stepped aside.

Sansa had given him a chamber fit for a man above his station, but it was still modest. She would have to have a tapestry made for him. The fire was low and there were few candles, but she should have expected as much. Still, she wished for more light. Neither one of them moved far past the chamber door. It might have been awkward had they not been so constantly near each other in King’s Landing.

Sandor stood facing her, not moving, maybe not even breathing. She took three even steps toward him and took his hand in her own. He was warm, as he always was, but he could have been a pillar of ice in all his stillness.

One more half-step and she was nearly flush with his body. She looked up and met his eyes, and he looked like an animal in a snare.

“Am I wrong?” she asked.

“No,” he said, his hand curling around hers almost imperceptibly. She closed the distance between them. There was no give when she pressed her cheek against his chest; there was no resistance when she brought his hand around to rest at the small of her back. With an exhale that tickled the top of her head, he finally tightened his hold and brought the other arm around her.

There was no mistaking the intention or the effect: her breasts were pressed against him, and her hands rested on his back as they would if he were above her. She felt him stiffen against her stomach, and a pressure swelled within her to match. But the sweetest victory was this: there was no fear, no panic, no frantic maneuvering of mind or body—only the thrumming of his heartbeat under her cheek and the shy tangle of his fingers in her hair.

She smiled despite herself, and gently scratched her fingers up and down his lower back. She was old enough to know what she wanted and how to get it, but this was what she needed.

They stayed that way for several moments, because it felt nice and because there was no reason to do anything else. When her hands moved from his back to his hips and gave ever the slightest pressure, he released her slowly but obediently. That, too, was what she needed.

Sansa did not know what possessed her, but she kissed him softly and chastely on his chest where her cheek had been, only because she wanted to and could not reach anywhere else. She felt the shiver run up his body, and felt an obscene rush of something like power. She wished he did not still have his tunic on—he would have really shivered, then.

“Sansa,” he said, brokenly and for the first time.

“Was that alright?” she said. “I only wanted to.”

He nodded, releasing a somewhat shaky breath. Sansa began to feel guilty. She had not meant to unsettle him. She did not mean to act like a regular harlot, either, but she needed proof of what she already instinctively felt: he was safe. He would not hurt her. He was a starving man, but he was not a bad one—he would take what she gave, and no more.

If he had pressed her, she might have given all, but he did not.

“Thank you for going after Rickon,” she said.

“I thought he was dead,” Sandor replied.

“I thought so, too,” she said, still holding his hand.

“I shouldn’t have barked at him. Scared him shitless.”

“Perhaps,” she laughed, “but perhaps that’s what he needs. I am not hard enough on him.”

“You are too hard on yourself,” he said. He was right. All she could do was sigh. “You have been weeping,” he said, and it was no question. She had forgotten about her red-rimmed eyes. She was momentarily embarrassed, but he had seen her much worse. He had seen her not leave a bed for days.

To her surprise, he pulled her back into his arms, not ungently. “You’re still a pretty thing, even all puffed up and snotty,” he said to the top of her head, and she laughed harder than she had in days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanted to get this one posted. It'll be a few days until the next one. I believe things will start to heat up soon.. Well, the UST, not the weather. Thanks for reading and leaving your glorious, luscious, beautiful comments. :)


	10. Chapter 10

All men have their limits. All women, too, but that side of the coin is seen far less.

She hoped he would understand it was alright for him to do something, anything, if he wanted to. She had given him permission.

He never said it, but she knew he desired her. She knew most men desired her, and had learned to see the signs. She learned how to follow the tracks that men’s eyes made when they thought no one was the wiser. She could almost see their minds working, spinning vulgar scenes with her as the centerpiece. With some men, it nearly made her retch. With him, it made her heart beat faster, banging against her ribs like a bird gone mad in a cage.

With time, she understood that he had desired her even back then, when she was a near-woman, a half-formed promise of her future self. She understood that he was not the only one. Not by far. If Sandor were still the same person he had been, things might have gone differently, but he was not. He was the same in essence, but he had learned restraint. He had learned silence. She had initially thought he had learned peace, perhaps some sliver of contentment, but that was still out of reach for him, as it was for her. Sansa doubted that peace and contentment could be found upon the cold altars of a sept, especially for a man such as Sandor Clegane. His redemption would have to be something warmer.

They have been far too familiar for far too long. She wondered what kept them from boiling over like an unwatched pot of soup. It was bound to happen eventually, with so many dark hours to kill in between calamities.

He found her the next night on a winding stair. She had gone up to the rooms that were unused: the ones that used to be ladies’ chambers and solars and sewing rooms. Some of them had been Lyanna’s and no one had disturbed them for years, but some had been made into storage rooms for fabrics and string. Oddly enough, much of it escaped the burning. Flames do not travel well through stone.

“Are you in the habit of searching stairways until you find me?” she asked.

“Tonight I am,” he said. His voice made her shiver. She descended the next few steps between them.

It seemed Sandor had a question of his own—or a challenge.

His fingers pinched her chin, gently but firmly, different than years ago. He leaned down and brought his lips close to hers, his face in full sight, the ruin illuminated by a nearby torch. She knew what he was doing, and she would not look away. She had made her choice, and it was time for him to make his.

He finally closed the distance, tilting her face up and pressing his lips to hers. At once, Sandor had left his domain and entered hers. She knew no woman would have kissed him sweetly, as a lover would, not without coin. She leaned against him, opening her mouth slightly.

His lips felt strange, one side soft and one side scarred over. She wondered how much he felt there. She ran her little tongue over his bottom lip to find out, and he groaned his answer.

His hand left her chin and held the back of her head, his other hand finding her lower back, nearly slamming her body flush with his. _Finally,_ she thought. She found his cheek with her hand as her tongue begged for entry. She was surprised when he opened his mouth and met her halfway. He was inexperienced, but he was a quick, hungry learner.

Sansa found his hips with her hands, felt the tough leather of his belt and the soft fabric of his tunic. She slid her cold hands up and met his hot skin—his sharp intake of breath was nearly a hiss, like a blade being cooled. She made some sound in the back of her throat she had not meant to make, and one of them rocked against the other one, though she could not say who started it.

His lips broke away from hers for all of a second, and she felt the cold air stir around her mouth. When he kissed her again, it was less hurried, less frenzied. He was less clumsy. His massive hand cupped her cheek, and he brushed his thumb over her bottom lip before catching it again with the press of his own. His next kiss landed to the side of her lips, the next to her jaw. His hand dove lightly into her hair and tilted her head to the side, and his lips found the alabaster curve of her neck. Her body shivered of its own accord. Some knowing told her he’d thought about doing this and more, had meditated on her pulse points like prayers.

Suddenly, it was too much. The force of his wanting and her past abuses hit her full-on like a seaside gust, and she felt her throat constricting.

“Sandor,” she said, embarrassed when his name came out as more of a breath than a word. “Sandor, I want to stop.”

He froze, breathing heavily but silently near her neck. He straightened, and his eyes snapped to hers. _The sky in a storm,_ she thought, not for the first time.

“I want to stop for now,” she said, “Not forever.” He searched her eyes, struggling, but nodded. He untangled his hand from her hair, clumsily brushing some of her mussed waves back into place. Sansa might have seen his hands tremble, but she was polite, and so she did not point it out.

 

+

 

_Sansa_

_I am going to the forest with Sandor I will be back soon._

_Love Rickon_

 

Sansa’s heart leapt at her brother’s progress. The note was sloppily written, but it was written. He had most assuredly had the Maester’s help with it, but still, it was something.

A drop of ink had smudged across the top of the page, and he had added ears and a snout to make it look like a wolf. It was a creative solution, but eventually she would have to show him how not to get ink everywhere. She pictured her brother flitting around the Maester’s chambers with ink all over his hands, and she smiled.

_The forest._ She trusted Sandor, trusted him with the most precious thing in her world, and Rickon was not without his instincts to flee, but she still felt fear curl inside her, swirling like a murky pool. It was the first sunny day they had had in weeks, and Sansa herself planned to steal some moments to go outside. Several hunters were going out as well, and they would stick to the places where the snow was already packed down. They would not be gone long. But the forest was dark enough even in full sun—the ancient trees arched together and wove a false sky, or the pines huddled so close that you had to move sideways through them and still get covered in sap. There were frozen lakes and streams hidden below the snow, and the ice was not very likely to break at all, but it might. And that was only the forest itself. She did not let herself think much on what dwelled there, stumbling and hissing in the dark, raging at the space between them and the living. Sometimes, in quiet moments in her solar or in the cellars, she would hear her own pulse pounding in her ears and throat. _Quiet,_ she would think,driven to madness at the thought that those stalking creatures with ice shards for eyes could hear her life’s blood moving, could smell it.

That is what the old wildling man had said: they smell blood. They smell life.

Rickon’s letter was far different from the last letter she had received. Before the ravens stopped coming or going, the Wall had sent her a lonely missive, hastily written and unsigned. _Winter has come. The Others have come. There are weapons behind the wall. The Wall has fallen._ Each statement had its own line, sprawled unevenly across the small paper. Sansa did not need the letter: she was already aware of all it described. However, something about it needled at her and she could not figure out why. She kept the little paper uncurled on her desk, resting under a glass weight. Sometimes she wondered if Jon were still alive and at the Wall. Sometimes she dreamed Jon himself had written the letter, but she knew it was folly.

 

+

 

Rickon swung himself up into the saddle, still glancing warily in Sandor’s direction. Sansa had told her brother to apologize, and had told Sandor to go easy on the boy when he did. That was all she could do. She hoped they found whatever they were looking for in the woods.

“Be safe,” she told Rickon. “Watch your surroundings.”

“I know,” he said petulantly. A boy’s ego is a fragile thing. He led his horse a few paces toward the forest line, impatient. Shaggy loped after him lazily.

“Be safe,” she echoed to Sandor.

“Yes, _my lady,”_ he said. “I’ll watch out for squirrels and snow drifts.”

“Do not jape with me, Sandor Clegane. I could not be more serious.”

“I’ll look out for him,” he said.

“And yourself.”

“And myself,” he said, giving her a queer look. Sometimes he looked at her like she had sprouted spots, or had taken to wearing a boot on her head. Sansa ignored him. It was not ridiculous for someone to care if he came back home before nightfall. He would simply have to accept it.

Sansa walked slowly back to her chambers. The sun shone in spells. It was not much, but it was more than they had seen in days, or maybe weeks. Sansa almost imagined she felt warmth on her face, but that may have been fantasy.

The sun reminded her of the glass gardens, now abandoned. They were too late—nothing could grow. It was too cold, and there was not enough sun. The only thing the partial walls of glass had accomplished was to create a place that was just a breath warmer than the air outside.

Food was stored everywhere, not just in the cellars and cold rooms. Sansa had made sure that she was the only one who knew where every last scrap was—a practical application of Petyr’s lessons in politics. If the Others did not come for them all, she did not plan on starving to death, that much was certain.

As she always did, she made her rounds, checking on different sections of the castle. She was glad for the freedom to safely go wherever she pleased. After her time spent as Alayne, she could not go back to being shackled. She would not.

Eventually, Sansa settled down at the large desk in her solar. She was in the habit of keeping lists of all the supplies they had on hand, all except for the food and weapons. Those had lists and tallies, but they were not entirely correct, of course. She had also written down all that the old wildling man had told her about the Others, about wights, about giants and ice spiders and the Children who lived in the forest, all the things that lived beyond the Wall. It all sounded like a regular child’s tale, but she could not afford to dismiss it.

_Beyond the Wall._

Sansa grabbed for the small piece of parchment, scanning it with her eyes for the hundredth time.

_There are weapons behind the wall,_ it read.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the gap. This semester is horrific. Thanks for reading and suspending your disbelief. :)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for brief and vague references to past sexual abuse.

Sansa once again found herself in the chambers of dead women, keeping company with cobwebs and spools of thread. She made a note to herself to ask them to be cleaned. It seemed almost blasphemous to leave them as they were, all covered in dust and forgotten. She was searching in vain for something that would connect her to the numberless women who had gone before her—quite suddenly, she needed to know their secrets. She needed to know what they knew: she needed to learn how the ancient ones had survived the Long Night. She needed to know what they had done, needed to know how they laughed and wept and loved and lost all while an eternal darkness shrouded them. She was searching for some whisper of truth, some relic or amulet that would give her a clue. She was also searching for a wall hanging for Sandor Clegane’s bedchamber.

There were dusty skeins of fabric lying in hopeful piles all over the solar. One by one, she turned them upright, knocking the dust off and lining them up in a row. She sneezed into her sleeve indelicately, and was glad that nobody was around to witness it.

Most of the cloth was either too lightweight, too fine, or both, and that is why it had been left behind. Something green caught her eye. She ran her fingertips across it, and it was midway between soft and coarse, and a bit lighter than velvet. It was a hushed pine-green, just like a cloak he had long ago. It was the obvious choice. It would suit him.

Decided, she pulled the skein out of the row and leaned it against a wall. She would send some of the girls for it later. They were all part of the cook’s flock of novices: they all did a bit of cooking, serving, washing, and sewing. Several of them were quite young and without families of any kind, but they could be trusted to do quick, good work, especially when gifted with a jar of fruit jam from Sansa’s own stores.

Sansa realized that she had been humming, and nearly stopped short. The last time she had hummed or sang was the night that Sweetrobin had died. She had expected his death to be violent, filled with spells and spittle, but he simply slipped away.

_But the Dornishman's blade was made of black steel, and its kiss was a terrible thing._

Sansa shuddered. She did not want to think of the Dornishman’s wife and her lover. She did not want to think of winter and its own blade of black steel. She did not want to think of Sweetrobin and his skin gone cold.

 _Gentle mother, font of mercy,_ she sang when she did not know what else to sing, and this time was no different.

 

+

 

“If anyone asks, just say I’m his wet nurse,” Sandor said. Rickon wrinkled up his nose. He was too old for a wet nurse.

“I’m sure that no one will think anything of it,” Sansa replied. Sandor sat next to Rickon, joining the Starks and Maester Haywyn at their dinner table for the first time. Rickon had begged him for weeks, and he had finally relented. The boy had finished his rolls and gravy, and sat chewing eternally on a dry chunk of meat. Sansa tried very hard not to laugh at his look of concentration.

“Look at this,” she said, passing the small piece of parchment to Sandor across Rickon’s plate. Sandor unrolled it and read it, then read it again.

“What about it?”

“Do you see anything odd in it?”

“Someone wrote it right before they died, most like,” he snorted.

“What are you looking at?” chimed Rickon.

“Nothing,” they said in unison. Sansa daintily picked at her roll. Sandor studied the note a third time.

“Why does it say _behind_ the wall?” he said.

“That is exactly what I was wondering.”

“Are there any false walls in the castle?”

“None that I know of, but that does not mean anything,” Sansa admitted. “Could it be somewhere near the armory?” she asked quietly.

“Wouldn’t think so. Too obvious.”

“Of course. You are right,” she said, feeling foolish. Sandor passed the note back to her, and she carefully rolled it back up.

“I want to see!” Rickon said.

“You have seen it before, and you showed no interest,” Sansa said. It was true. She read him every letter they received before the letters stopped. Rickon only _hmphed_ and slid down in his chair.

Sandor nodded to her over Rickon’s head. He could keep a secret.

“The beef gravy is very hardy this evening,” said Maester Haywyn, willfully oblivious. Sandor laughed. Rickon chewed sullenly.

It took a great deal of effort on Sansa’s part not to bury her head in her hands.

Sansa had made a point to serve herself more than usual, and was now making a point to finish her meal. It seemed a lifetime ago that she had cakes and tarts aplenty, and worried about her figure filling out too much. Now she was fighting her over-pronounced collarbones and the ever-present threat of sickness. She looked at the men around her, and they seemed to have no struggle whatsoever with eating whatever was given to them. _How fitting,_ she thought, right before she was struck with an idea.

 

 

+

 

She took candles with her when she went, but it was more for the gesture than it was for actual light. She knew better than to waste too many candles, but she wanted to see him. She wanted him to know that she wanted to see him.

She knocked three times on his bedchamber door; he pulled it open like he had been waiting there for her forever.

Sansa did not put the candles near the bed—she knew better than that. He would not have it, and if his bedding ever actually caught fire, she would not be the reason for it. She put three on the table near the center of the room, and four on the small table against the wall that might have once held some decoration or another. Sandor sat on the bed, watching her. His eyes were dark. She had made her point.

He was always still, always poised to erupt in sudden action, sudden violence. He was always tense, like some hunting animal waiting to attack, or some hunted animal waiting to flee. It used to put her ill at ease, but now it was familiar to her. Now she understood he could not be any other way—nothing else had been written into the annals of his life. She wanted to learn how to make him yield, make him go lax and careless. She wanted to untie him like a knot of tangled thread. When he touched her, she felt the tension in him like the most basic of truths: it was the same as her being a woman or Shaggy being a wolf.

Sansa wanted to be untied as well; she wanted to be smoothed like a palm over a wrinkled length of silk.

She crossed the room without haste, as though she had done it thousands of times. It was the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to settle herself sideways across his lap, to go limp against him like she had nothing to fear.

“Sansa, you don’t have to do this,” he said, even as he tightened his arms around her.

“I want to,” she said.  ‘You’re not like him. You don’t _feel_ like him.” _You never could._

Petyr was mint and velvet and all things that slither. Sandor was bone and heat and hard edges where Petyr had been soft. Nothing was the same as before. Sansa wanted more, she wanted her memories slain and rewritten.

She looked up and he was seething, boiling as he always did when they talked about Petyr, or Tyrion, or Marillion, or any number of others. The side of his mouth twitched. She sat up and brushed her fingers across his lips, feather-light. She met his eyes, only closing them the second before her lips found their mark.

This time he did not hesitate. One hand cupped the back of her neck while the other found her thigh over her skirts and dragged her closer. She was right over his groin and she could feel him. A thousand protests leapt up in her mind, but this was not the same as before. This was wanted.

She tried to cup his neck, to bring him closer, kiss him full-on and without reservation. She ran her thumbs across the jawline on both sides—she wanted to know what he felt like.

The angle was all wrong, and some sound came from low in his throat before he scooped her up and draped her across his bed. In an instant he was hovering above her, and it was like the dream she had dreamed in the Eyrie; so much that it took her breath away.

Her skirts were in the way. She wriggled until she could pull them up and bend her knees, and then he was in the space that her legs had made. She felt him grind against her woman’s place, and she gasped. Some instinct made her legs hook around him, and her hands find his shoulders. Sansa wanted to see his face; wanted to see if she was doing the right things, but his mouth was against her neck, muttering something about Gods and birds.

Sandor’s hand found her leg, ducking under her skirts and sliding up past her stocking. When his fingers met the hot skin of her thighs, she knew she wanted this new touch for herself, wanted it on every part of her body all at once.

She rocked against him, partly because she thought he might like it, and partly because she did not know what else to do. Her rocking caused his hand to find her smallclothes abruptly, and she froze. Should she have taken off her clothes? She did not know what to do. He hadn’t told her.

His hand stilled, and he kissed his way from her neck to her mouth. She still did not know what to do—she just kissed him back, her heart hammering in her chest, her legs and arms suddenly unsure.

That was it—that was what she did wrong. She knew she would do something wrong. All of the sudden, he was studying her like he did when he was trying to see past her chirping. _I’m not lying,_ she wanted to peep. _I’m not._ But no words would come out of her swollen lips. And then the space between her legs was cold.

“I won’t force you, girl,” he rasped from the edge of the bed, and she was scurrying backwards, trying to sit up amid the mess of her skirts. “Are you afraid of me?” he asked, in a tone she had not heard from him before.

She shook her head _no. No, no, no,_ she thought. _I am not afraid, I am nervous._ Tears stung the corners of her eyes, not because she was afraid, but because it was going so horribly wrong. The tears were her fatal mistake.

He jerked his gaze away from her, finding some spot on the floor to throw his daggers at. She could feel the anger on him like heat on a fire. She wanted to explain everything, tell him she wanted to but she did not know how, but she knew she would stutter and stammer and convince him even more that she was afraid.

“Fly away, little bird. You have nothing to fear from the likes of me,” he said bitterly. “Might be you can find someone else to relieve your _aching,_ someone you can stomach to lie with.”

 _Stop,_ she wanted to say. She suddenly found she was angry—angry at him for being so self-hating, so wrong about everything all of the time. Did he think so little of her to think she did not know what she wanted, what she was doing? If she wanted to play a child’s game, she would find an easier opponent, that much was certain.

Sansa stood from his bed, tugged her dress back into place. Though her eyes were watering and her hands were trembling, she straightened herself and summoned her Lady’s voice, her talons and her teeth.

“When you are finished putting your words in my mouth, Sandor Clegane, you may see yourself to my chambers and make your apologies any way you see fit.”

She turned on her heel and left him there, the seven candles still burning. He could keep them. He could blow them out one by one, then sit in the dark like the miserable thing he was. It was no concern of hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm nervous. Please don't hate me! (EDIT: Thank you for not hating me! Thank you for the amazing reviews and feedback. School is brutal and I really don't want to half-arse this story, so the next few updates may be slower, but please stay tuned!)


	12. Chapter 12

Something grabbed Sansa’s ankles, digging in through her stockings with startling little pricks, and she screamed.

The cook erupted in belly-laughter as two of the serving girls giggled into their piles of potato peels.

“Rickon!” Sansa yelled, grabbing at the threadbare tablecloth, but he was out running from the other side of the table, laughing terribly. Before Sansa could restrain herself, her cider was sloshing over the rim of her abandoned stone mug and she was up from the table and after him.

Her heels smarted from running across stone in slippers, but her brother was twenty paces in front of her, and she was laughing so hard that her sides hurt.

She chased him through the kitchens and into the hall, grateful he had not run into the courtyard instead. She could not run through the slush and ruin her shoes, and it was far too dark out there, besides. Shaggy suddenly bounded out from behind her, startling her even more, but all she could do was laugh and run. Shaggy raced past them both and was gone down the hall toward the library tower, but Sansa took Rickon by surprise and caught him, grabbing him around his center with both arms. She pinched his sides and his armpits and he shrieked and thrashed. Finally, he got loose and took off again, but she just laughed and shook her head. She could not give chase a second time—hers was a body built by relative leisure, not by running with wolves.

Her breath came in painful huffs and her heels stung, but she would not give up the chance to play with her little brother for all the comfort in the world. He was hard to reach; he was like a wild animal, more likely to dart away than to approach an outheld hand. She often felt that she could get nowhere near him, but she could not help trying. It was Sandor who truly had Rickon’s trust, and even he was considered with wary glances more often than not.

It was the morning after she had gone to Sandor’s rooms, and he was nowhere to be found. That was why Rickon was bored and looking for someone to torment. Sansa regretted that she had taken her brother’s only friend away from him—whether Sandor’s absence would last a day or a month, neither was fair to the boy. She hoped he would come to the same conclusion and not punish her brother for their own failures.

“Has he been down to get any wine?” Sansa said quietly when she returned to the kitchens. The cook and the serving girls looked at one another. There was no need to ask who _he_ was.

“No, m’lady. He hasn’t been down at all.”

That was something, at least. He was not drinking himself into a retching mess.

“If he hasn’t reappeared by dinner, send him something to eat,” she said, forcing her words out past the lump of disappointment in her throat. Sansa steeled herself. Sandor was a man who had gotten by on will alone for far too long to have a weak one. Waiting for him to come around would be like waiting for beans to grow in the glass gardens—she might be waiting until summer, and then there might only be a speck of green amid the dirt and manure.

 

+

 

The next day, the Hound and his demons had skulked back out of their hiding place and set to prowling around in plain sight. He rabidly chopped up the great tree trunks that had been dragged into the courtyard through the gates some days ago. Sansa did not have time to fret over him, to think about kisses in the dark and his words like branding irons: the sky had gone black.

She had ordered all capable hands to chop wood and keep flames. Every gate was shut, save for the east gate to Wintertown. More and more smallfolk poured in, scattering into halls and houses like roaches running from a boot.

That morning—if it could be called a morning—she had awakened in a cold sweat, her head and chest pounding. She had thrown open her curtains and been met with her own reflection shining back at her. Beyond that, there was nothing besides the pitch-dark pool of ink spilled across the morning sky.

She had run from the Great Keep into the courtyard, as though being outside would give her a different view and she would find it not to be true. Winter storms had darkened the days before, but this was different. The air was still. Before, the wind had been a mother wailing over her dead child; the thunder had been a war drum; the ice had been a thousand arrows clattering against the stones and thatching. There was no wind; only the sounds of commotion and crackling fire.

It must have been nearing midmorning and there was no light to see by. The castle was up in flames: there were fires on the walls, great piles of licking flame in clusters in the courtyard, and flickering torches held in shaking hands. _Save it,_ she wanted to order. _Save the firewood, or it will never last._ She could not bring herself to deprive them of light. The Others would come, and they would die today or they would die tomorrow or some other day—it made no difference. If the torches and bonfires gave her people some measure of comfort, it would be so.

Sansa herself was afraid, so afraid. Would the sun ever freckle her cheeks again before she died?

The eerie silence was broken by the howling of wolves, and for once, their howls were not lullabies. They shrilled and yipped somewhere in the dark. Shaggydog went mad, running a wide circle around the courtyard before disappearing out the last gate. Sansa shivered.

In the end, nothing came for them. They stood ready with torches and steel, making believe that there was a chance in the seven kingdoms they could defend themselves. The day continued in its eerie, quiet blackness, and there was nothing to do except wait. Mothers kept their children inside; men paced around with their weapons and fanned the flames. Sansa called Rickon to her side and would not let him leave, though it was all for her own comfort and not at all for his. Shaggy had gone, and that made throat go dry with fear. There was no set of fangs to watch over her brother. _Starks should not be without their wolves._ As the day passed, she handed him over to the Maester Haywyn for safekeeping.

Sansa did not know what orders to give, what action to take. They were not under siege. There was no enemy at the gates—at least not one that would make itself known. Even if there had been, she knew little of military command. She had spoken to the Maester and to the master at arms at length, and they had gone through several scenarios should the need to fight ever arise. She was trying to read through the histories, to glean anything she could from those who had succeeded and failed before her, but all she had were the few volumes the Maester had brought with him when he had been sent from the citadel. Sansa was a good student, but there are things that cannot be learned from a book. There are things that can only be learned by living through them, _bleeding_ through them.

A thought niggled at her mind, trying to push its way past the worries and tasks at hand. Sandor had been through battle; had been fighting since he was only a few years older than Rickon. Apart from that, he had spent years blending into walls and shadows, completely forgotten by kings and queens and their pawns, saying nothing but hearing everything.

She heard the scrape of a blade being honed before she saw his dark outline. The stables were dimly lit. Compared to the rest of the castle, the stables were like a crypt: dusky and undisturbed. It struck her as foolish to polish a blade in a time like this—it was a bastard sword, and even the finest would not have harmed the Others. He must have known that. She thought back to all the times he had patted or palmed it despite himself, and remembered it was more than a weapon. To him, the warm pommel was comfort; the cold metal was life. The thought made her sad.

The scraping stopped abruptly. At the last moment, she lost her courage and decided to leave him be.

 

+

 

Their eyes were shards of ice, just like the legends had said. They flashed like the cold, distant stars, except they were near—far too near.

Sansa was alone, naked, without pelt or petticoat, stumbling through the stabbing ice and snow. The Others were all around her. Where would she go when she died? Would she be one of them?

Her lungs burned, and she thought they might burst. She could hardly see through the swirling of the snow and wind, through her own freezing tears. She stopped short when she almost ran straight into one of the cold things. She swiveled around to run the opposite way, but there were legions of them, all dead and evil. She started backing away, sinking into the snow up to her knees. It _burned._ She backed up into something warm and dry—she thought it was a person until she threw her hands backwards and felt the smooth bark of the weirwood. The great tree twisted and groaned, and before she knew what was happening, she was pierced—boughs bended until their very tips were curving around her and through her, stabbing her skin and anchoring her to the tree. Her pale skin was one with the bark and the snow; her hair could have been thousands of blood-red leaves. The ancient face of the weirwood looked beyond her, into the army of cold ones, and wept onto her shoulder. _Sister,_ it hissed, and Sansa snapped her eyes shut.

She saw her dead brother Bran, fell with him as he fell, burned with fever with him as he wasted away. Then, she was running with Summer, running _in_ Summer, and she felt Lady’s absence in its full force again, sharp and silencing. The wolf’s eyes were not frozen over with tears, they were perfect and clear. Sansa wished they were not. The Wall loomed above her in all its enormity, and it frightened her. She thought the wolf meant to run straight into it, to hit head-on like an arrow to its mark, but suddenly she was under the Wall and through it, and her body was neither wolf nor woman—it was something else. A man. A _boy._ It was wrong to be in this boy’s body: it was condemned by the laws of nature, an affront to life. She struggled to break free, but could not. _Sister,_ something whispered.

The boy’s feet took stairs two at a time, his heart pounding in his ribs, his throat making distant whimpering sounds that echoed Sansa’s own distress. The boy flew through corridors, dodging men left and right, running the opposite way. He burst into a room that held the quarking of a dozen crows and the smell of burning leather; his stubby, dirty fingers grappled across a desk, trapping a small piece of parchment flat on the wood.

All at once, Sansa found she could move her body again. She forcibly snapped herself awake, out of the dream and back into her cold chambers. She hated nights like these, _hated_ them. It felt like someone were holding her body down, and she always saw the most terrible things…

She was up and lacing her boots without any direct thought; she simply could not stay in bed after those dreams. She never could. A quick glance to the window told her it was nowhere near sunrise, but then she remembered that the darkness did not mean anything. She felt like she’d barely been asleep for an hour. She grabbed a cluster of candles from a nearby table and was off.

Her feet took her up into the heights of the Great Keep, back to the women’s rooms and solars. She had been going there often of late. Something about the dusty old rooms comforted her, and she had been thinking about starting a new embroidery project. It had been so long since she had sewn anything, she wondered if her fingers would remember the way.

An ancient door creaked on its hinges, and she was inside her favorite room. Sansa liked to tell herself that it had been Lyanna’s room, but there was no way for her to know. It was a bedchamber, but it had a sitting area with a table, as most of the larger bedchambers did. She set her candles on the table and started rummaging around for the black thread and linen she had collected—she wanted to embroider Shaggydog on something for Rickon, but she wanted to practice first.

Her thigh bumped a bedside table in the near-dark, and she heard something clatter to the floor behind it. It was an awful thing to blindly stick her hand behind the table and pat around for the lost object, but eventually her slender fingers closed around a thimble. The stones were cold on the back of her hand when she drew it out.

Several moments later, she was slamming her candlestick down on the ground and frantically scooting the table out of the way. _The stones are cold._ She told herself she was being ridiculous, but this was the Great Keep—there were pipes in the walls of the bedchambers, and the stones should have been warm to the touch, but these were ice-cold.

Her fingers poked and prodded here and there. What would a false wall look like? How would it open? Before she had time to think of the answer, one of the stones seemed to give beneath her fingers. She pressed it again, harder, and one end poked out while the other end angled inward. Sansa noticed that the stones around it held no mortar: they were simply wedged together expertly, looking no different than any other wall in any other room. After the first stone, they came out easily, one by one, creating an opening that was small to the eye but much larger inside. Getting her candle as close to the wall as she could, she reached her arm inside and felt around carefully, but she sliced her finger on an edge of something anyway. Holding her breath, she carefully pulled it out of the crevice. The hilt was wrapped in leather with a rough-cut sapphire in the pommel, and the blade was black as night.

 

+

 

_Of course,_ Sansa thought. _Women are keepers of the things men leave behind._ Of course the dragonglass would be hidden in a woman’s bedchamber.

She had run to the Maester’s chambers to wake him, but he was gone. It was important that she spoke to him at once: she was elated to have found the weapons, but she simply did not know what to do with them. There were not enough to hand out to the men: there might have been several daggers and a sword she could not get out. She needed to ask the Maester what she should do. She needed to ask him if there might be more. She wished to speak to Sandor, but she did not know where he would be. _Somewhere far away from here,_ she thought, as she recalled the flames in the courtyard.

After the excitement of her find, she was exhausted. Her bed beckoned to her like a siren’s song, and she thought the daggers could wait until the morning, if there would be one.

In her room, the fire burned low. She had to adjust her eyes to see.

“Little bird,” he rasped, and she realized she had been expecting him.

“Sandor?” she peeped.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, emerging from the shadows.

“You never do,” she said, moving toward him out of habit. Sansa realized she had all but forgotten their incident: she was tired from all else, and she did not want to fight with him.

“I know what happened,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The other night, when you came to my chambers.”

“When you thought I was frightened of you?” she asked. His mouth twitched. She had thought to make him chew on his words for a fortnight, but now her heart had softened. He took her in a loose embrace, like he was afraid to get too close. “I know what happened. It’s the same as me with fire,” he said, his burned lips against her forehead. “Forgive me.”

“I have not been afraid of you since I was a _child,”_ she said. “Other men have hurt me, but you do not frighten me, and you do not disgust me. I simply did not know what to do, and you punished me for it.”

He was shaking, his muscles twitching and flexing like his body did not know there was no battle outside. She knew he would be ill at ease: there were too many flames around, and he no longer drank wine to numb his fear.

“What makes you think I know what to do with _you,_ little bird? Hmm? I never touched a woman I didn’t pay, and I never lingered at that.”

“I never touched a man I wanted to. Are we so different?” she said, perhaps a little too sharply. She smoothed her hands over his arms, trying to calm him. She remembered a greenlit night long ago, and reached up to cup his cheek—the burned one. She could stomach all the ruined parts.

“Come to bed,” she said. “You are shaking.”

“The whole courtyard’s on fire,” he said, unmoving.

“I know. It will burn out soon. There’s only snow and stone left, anyway.” It was true enough. They were burning through firewood too quickly, and they would have to ration it soon. They would simply have to get used to the dark, if the Others weren’t coming after all.

He considered her a moment before taking her hand and giving her a light tug toward the bed. Sansa's heart ached for him often, but it was most acute when he was shy, acting like a boy half his age. She followed him: it was his turn to start, his turn to place himself in her mercy. She would let him do what he would.

He placed her on the platform that held her bed, as easily and gently as he had placed her on the ground after the riots. She knew what his large hands felt like around her waist like she knew the sound of running water or the taste of lemons. Something about him was given. She wondered when that had begun, or what it meant, but his fingers were on her laces and she forgot her wondering. 

He inexpertly tugged at her dress until it was loose enough to push from her shoulders. Her chemise underneath was plain cream linen, and she wished she had worn one with lace. He did not care: his hands came to rest on her shoulders, slipping under the loose fabric and beginning to slide it off.

"I want to see you," he said low, and it felt like a rumble of thunder confined in her body.

"Wait," she said. Her hands found the buckle of his swordbelt, but he took over and removed it, laying it within easy reach. When he came back, her hands tugged his overcoat from his shoulders. She has never seen him laid bare before; they were on unequal ground. 

She found the ties of his jerkin, but he once again surpassed her in speed, loosening the leather and slipping it over his head. Was he impatient or just eager to please? _Most likely both_ , she thought, holding back a giggle. She toyed with the hemline of his tunic anyway, until he snorted at her and tossed that off, too. She had meant to school her expression, but her shock must have bled through.

"You must have seen a man without his tunic before,” he said lightly, but she knew he was as anxious as she was.

"None like you." It was true—his skin was a map of past pain. His burn scars crept down his throat and faded at his shoulder. His arm showed evidence of another burning. There was a straight line near his other shoulder, raised and puckered, and it could only have been an arrow. The others were almost too many to count—slashes here, gashes there, for years upon years. She wanted a timeline for each of them. She wanted to catalogue them in her ledgers like she did carrots and peas.

"How are you alive?" she asked, testing the arrow scar with her fingers.

"If you keep asking me that I might start to think you'd prefer me dead."

"No. Never."

“That’s not even the worst of them,” he said. His tone was bitter, but it might have held some measure of pride as well.

There were lines that went down from his hips into his breeches, and Sansa did not know what those were called or why he had them, but she found she liked them. She found herself tracing her fingers there before timidly starting to undo his laces.

“Such a forward little lady,” he said, and his words had the effect of coloring her cheeks and increasing the pressure between her legs all at once. She dropped her hands, suddenly nervous. _Do not mock me,_ she told him with her eyes.

“Don’t mind me, girl. Do what you like,” he said, dipping low, his dark hair hanging in his face. He cupped her cheek, less clumsily than before, and brought his lips to hers. It was slow and unhurried, almost gentle. She let him have his pace. There was no need to rush.

His hands slipped her chemise from her shoulders, and the cold air hit her skin in a sudden shock. His mouth left hers, and that was a shock of cold, too.

Sansa felt his eyes on her body; her breasts were bare, her skin prickling from the cool air. Her heart beat madly in its cage, but it was not fear. She felt Sandor cup her calf and slide her slipper and stocking off, doing the same on the other leg. His fingers toyed with the ribbons on her smallclothes, but did not pull them off.

“Little bird?” he said, and she looked at him once more. She nodded. Her smallclothes fell to the floor, forgotten.

“Gods, you’re beautiful,” he might have said, but his hands were up and down her bottom and her thighs, his lips were against her lower stomach, and her heartbeat was pounding so loud in her ears she thought she might faint.

“Sandor, I am cold,” she said.

He stood up surprisingly fast for his bad leg, and she backed herself up to the bed and sat down, not sure what to do. She sat there naked on top of the furs like some sort of cake topping, feeling like a fool. His fingers tangled in the laces of his breeches and then pushed them down, and she could not look away and could not look at the same time. She had _felt_ his manhood against her, but had never seen it. Then, his smallclothes were gone, and she saw his leg. She did not know where to look: his manhood enclosed in his fist, or the section of his leg that seemed to simply be missing.

Catching herself gawking, she scooted back to make room for him. She wished she had more time to look, but the chill in the room made them both scramble under the furs. He wrapped her in his arms, and nothing had ever felt like the length of his warm body against hers. There was no need for fire—he was enough heat.

“Go slowly, please,” she said, embarrassed at the breathy sound of her voice and the fact that she had just said _please._ She thought Sandor would laugh at that, but he did not.

Some moments later, and her maidenhead was gone. _Such a small thing, in the end,_ she thought, bewildered, as the sharp pain began to recede. He was an intrusion, that much was certain, but he had stilled when she asked him to and stayed panting and shaking above her. She experimented with hooking her legs around his, and that was the moment they both broke loose. “Sansa,” he said brokenly, “I can’t—"

“Please,” she said again, but with a different meaning, and that was all.

He tried to go slowly for her sake; she could tell. It did not last long. Her twinges of pain were nothing compared to the sensation building within her. She knew what it was, for she had chased it in long minutes with only her fingers for company in the Eyrie. She had thought her first time would be nothing but pain, and she would have to clench her eyes shut to keep the tears in, but she found herself singing a song of sighs and gasps and little noises she did not recognize: the song he had asked for years ago.

“I can’t, little bird,” he said again, his voice choked. She knew enough of men to know what he meant.

“Shh,” she said, wrapped around him with her fingers in his hair. “It’s alright—"

He was halfway between a moan and a sob, and then there was something warm and sticky on her thigh. She knew it was over, knew by the way his body went slack. She stroked his back, his arms; she noted with amazement that his muscles had turned to porridge. Her woman’s place ached, though from the act or from his sudden absence, she could not say. _Again,_ she thought. _Again._

When he finally found the strength to move from atop her, he did not go far: he fell to his side and pulled her against him so tightly she could hardly breathe. With her back against his warmth, she was instantly as tired as if she had walked a thousand miles. Tears pricked her eyes, and at first she could not place why she was crying, but she realized it was something like happiness and something like relief. She fell asleep listening to his slowing breaths and watching the dying embers in the hearth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been looking at this for like 3 days and I'm just gonna have to rip off the Band-aid. Sorry I was gone so long. :/


	13. Chapter 13

When Sansa woke, she immediately looked to the window. She had not bothered to draw the drapes, hoping to catch the first rays of sunlight if the night ever ended. The glass only reflected the flicker of firelight. A fresh fire glowed warmly in the hearth as though the world weren’t ending outside. Saddened, she stretched and curled back into the furs. She felt a burn in the muscles of her inner thighs and somewhere deeper, and she remembered.

_Sandor._ His clothes and his swordbelt were gone, his side of the bed long-cold. Sansa sat up slowly, feeling disoriented. Was it morning? She could not get used to this sudden, unending darkness. She wanted no part of it.

She was a woman bedded, and yet she felt no different. She felt no more wise or mature than she had the day before, only sore. There was no way for her to know how she was supposed to feel—there was no other woman for her to talk to. _Did I bleed?_ She said a prayer of thanks that her bedsheet would not be used as a decoration or the point of a jape. Tossing back the furs, she saw only a tiny blot of almost-red. _Such a small thing,_ she thought again. It truly did not matter at all.

She did not know where Sandor had gone. She wished he had stayed, but did not let herself feel upset: she had no claim over him, and she knew he rose early each morning.

She almost did not want to rise and wash herself. Her skin smelled like himand she found she didn’t mind it. Throughout the day, she would have to speak to the Maester and the cook and her own brother, and she could not do that with the mess on her thigh—her cheeks would rival Rhaegar’s rubies.

Wrapping her fingers in a soft cloth, she broke the thin layer of ice on top of the water in the washbasin. She cleaned herself slowly and methodically, flinching at the cold and the movement of her muscles. The nicest dress she had was sky-blue, made of wool but soft as spun cotton. Her stockings were plain and cream-colored like her chemises, and she only had a few pair, but she slipped on the softest ones. Sansa felt _good._ The fabrics were luxurious against her skin, as were the memories of the night before. A giggle or a sigh was poised in her throat like a drawn arrow, but she could not let it fly. She was near enough to being a queen to feel the press and squeeze of a crown around her temples, the ache in her neck and shoulders, though there was no physical metal or jewel to weigh her down. Most days, she cowed in the face of her incompetence, cringing and wishing for someone to guide her. Since the darkest night fell, it did not matter—she would do the best she could until it was all over, and there was nothing else for it. It was freeing, in the most hopeless of ways.

 

+

 

Sansa walked to the kitchens, rejoicing at the sting between her legs with each jarring step. It had been real, and not a dream, and she had not made it up in her head like a little fool.

The cook was charged with making more than the usual fare. Sansa ordered the slaughter of enough chickens to feed those who usually met in the Great Hall for dinner. They had been holding off on killing any livestock, but the hardy, northern chickens had been largely unimpressed by the worsening of the weather—they clucked and pecked and laid on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. They would be a stable source of food through the winter, and they could spare more than several here and there. Picturing juicy chicken glazed with honey made her stomach growl. It was finer than their usual dishes, but still simple and filling.

Sansa had a heavy gray cloak with fox fur lining, a gift from Petyr before his betrayals came back to haunt him. It was nearly an act of treason to don his cloak when she ventured outside, but she had grown too practical to set aside such a useful gift. Besides, it was steel-gray, Stark-gray, and there could not be anything wrong in that. She tied the cloak around her shoulders and pulled up the hood before walking around the courtyard to give her orders.

“Dim the fires,” she would say. “Dim the fires, and save firewood, if you can.” Some men gave her wary glances, others simply nodded with resignation, reminding her of children who had been sneaking candies with the knowledge they would be caught eventually. Still, the men obeyed. There were a handful of massive logs still being chopped and stacked in the courtyard, and more piles of dried firewood kept here and there, but at some point they would run low. Sansa would have to send men out into the night to fell more trees. The thought made her stomach turn.

When she thought of the few stubborn smallfolk, probably wildlings, still clinging to life in the plain stone houses of Wintertown, she felt a pang of fear and a streak of anger. She would not force them to come inside, but she wished they would. She could do little to protect the people inside the walls, but she could do _nothing_ to protect the ones outside them.

The outer wall was eighty feet of uncaring stone; the inner wall was one hundred feet of sneering challenge. Between them lay a trap: the moat. There was a thick layer of ice on top, but the water still flowed underneath, not frozen through. In certain areas, the ice was quite thin indeed, aided by the placement of natural hot springs. As long as the gates held, with any luck, any climbers would find themselves drowning.

That might protect them from men, but the Others would not care at all.

“Dim the first, but keep the ones on the wall lit,” she would say. They needed the light inside the courtyard, and they needed to be able to nock flaming arrows if the time came.

 

+

 

She needed to address the weapons. Before that, she needed to speak to the Maester, and before she spoke to him, she wanted to speak to Sandor, and somehow in the fray of it all she had forgotten about her little brother.

The familiar knot jerked in her throat, but she pushed it down. She was doing the best she could, and there was nothing else for it.

A child’s sniffling filled the echoing space of the great stone hall, and so she followed the echoes. Something within her would not let her simply walk by. Getting closer, she heard her brother’s tell-tale choking, his stunted half-sobs that he would make when trying to cry silently and failing. There was Sandor’s voice, too, rumbling low and steady, the same cadence he used to get Stranger to stop kicking.

She should have made herself known. It was so very backhanded to spy on them, but she could not help it. Backing into a wall close enough to hear, she slowed her breathing and tried to make out their words.

“Slow down, boy. There’s nothing to choke over,” she heard Sandor say, and she rolled her eyes. He did not have any sweet words to give, and his voice was no birdsong. Still, Rickon quieted somewhat, taking gulping breaths. “What’s this all about?”

“Shaggy is gone,” said Rickon.

“He’s gone into the forest, maybe, but he isn’t _gone._ ”

“Yes he _is._ I can’t feel him anymore. That means he’s dead,” said the boy, the word _dead_ renewing his sobbing. She heard Sandor heave a deep sigh.

“Might be he’s not. Might be he’s just off somewhere.” It was Sandor’s best stab at hopefulness. Rickon only cried.

 Sansa could take it no longer. She rounded the corner to find them both at a loss, Sandor squeezing the boy’s shoulder awkwardly, and Rickon leaning in but not too much—two broken things patting at each other in a mockery of comfort. They were both relieved to see her.

“Rickon, what’s the matter?” she said, opening her arms. Rickon folded himself into her, so different than the boy he was only months ago.

“Shaggy’s dead,” he whispered.

“If Shaggy were killed, you would feel it,” she said, wincing. “If you can’t feel him at all, maybe he’s far away, or maybe he doesn’t want you to know where he is,” She did not have enough time with Lady to fully understand these things, but what little she did know told her that the wolves were gathered elsewhere, and for their own reasons. Shaggydog and his pack could go where men could not.

“Have you had breakfast?” she asked, and he shook his head solemnly. Looping her arm around his shoulders, she began leading him to the kitchens, glancing at Sandor with a silent request. The large man loped along behind them, rather like a hound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little update. Chugging right along. Thanks for your patience/general badassery.


	14. Chapter 14

“Is this it?” Sandor asked, kneeling on the floor with his arm buried in the wall up to his shoulder.

“This is all I have found so far. There may be more,” Sansa said, her voice trailing off. Their words echoed in the quiet space. It felt as though they were trespassing on sacred ground, taking things that they ought to have left.

There were only eleven daggers—nine were regular blades for grown men, one was smaller, and one was just a sharp piece of dragonglass without a hilt. They were splayed out on the floor at Sansa’s feet like some kind of offering.

“There’s a sword in here,” said Sandor.

“I could not pull it out,” she replied. “I think it is stuck.”

Maester Haywyn ceased his wandering around the room and came closer. “Did you say there is a sword?” he asked.

Freeing the sword from however it was wedged within the wall, Sandor pulled it out in one fluid motion. It was a short sword, but it was made for a large man. Still kneeling, he laid it across his knees.

“Well, little bird, pray for red ripples and a sharp edge,” he said, and Gods help her, she did.

The sheath was stiff from decades or centuries of disuse, but it finally budged and slid free. The blade glinted in the light from their torches.

“Is it red?” Sansa asked. “I cannot tell.”

“It is Valyrian steel, my lady,” said Maester Haywyn. “And the others, the black ones, are dragonglass.” Sansa nodded, trying to believe what was in front of her eyes. She had relayed to the Maester all that the old wildling man had told her about the Others weeks ago, but something about his reaction made her think it was not new knowledge for him.

“Did you study magic at the Citadel, Maester?” Sansa asked, feeling like a fool as soon as the words were spoken.

“I was always curious, admittedly, but I only began to study the occult once I learned I was to be sent to Winterfell,” he replied. “Not to the knowledge of any of my archmaesters, of course,” he added.

Sandor chuckled and nodded, testing the blade with a fingertip and drawing a small crease of blood. “Lucky day to go pecking at walls,” he said.

“Let us hope,” Sansa replied.

 

+

 

The master at arms, Barton, joined them at the high table that night. The gruff man puffed up his chest good-naturedly at the invitation, eliciting a laugh from the other men present.

The dark still blotted out the sky, but inside the Great Hall was warm and pleasant. There must have only been fifty people in the benches, but it was intimate, not desolate. To save candles, they all squashed together at the front of the hall and lit very few. Beyond them, the black night clung to the walls and the rafters. They were like Winterfell itself: the last outpost in the darkness.

Sansa laughed softly at Barton’s japes, at first only to please him, but then because she was genuinely amused by him. He was oddly jovial for a man who dealt in weapons and death, but he was blunt and hard-lived, and not without his own sort of intelligence. He had once regaled her with the assurance that they called him “Bart the Bold” where he was from, but had changed the conversation when Sansa had asked him where that was. Regardless, she deemed him an honest man, else she would not have named him to his post. Her eyes flicked to Sandor at a nearby low table, and not for the first time, she wondered what she was to do with him.

Rickon yet fretted over Shaggy: his shoulders slumped, he ate his meal with dogged persistence, not enjoying a single bite. Contrary to his foul mood, he smiled at the older man’s attempts at conversation and at least made an effort to respond. It was a small thing, but Sansa’s chest hummed with pride. Their people already admired Rickon for the same reason they were wary of him: his wild nature was not a good omen for a ruler, but something about him was undeniably Stark, and they forgave him. She hoped he was beginning to learn some sort of control. Perhaps he could make them love him, someday.

That morning, they had found another hiding place in an unused chamber one level up from the previous one. It, too, only had a handful of dragonglass blades, but it was still better than nothing at all. The Maester had taken them all back to his turret to inspect them and keep them until Sansa decided what was to be done. She deliberated for a time, and with Sandor’s insistence decided to start carrying the small blade immediately. She would give one of the lighter daggers to Rickon, and the others would be distributed evenly so that there would always be dragonglass in several places throughout the castle. Though she hadn’t mentioned it yet, she had every intention of entrusting the Valyrian steel sword to Sandor. In her mind, there was no other place for it.

_I could make him captain,_ she thought. _Captain of the guards would suit him._ Nevermind that there were not very many guards at all, and Barton was perfectly capable at managing both the weapons and the men who used them. Night had fallen, but perhaps it would lift, whether in six days or six months or six years. If Winterfell ever became part of the rest of the world again, she planned to keep her sad old hound, preferably in plain sight, if that was his wish.

As always, he was outright staring at her, and as always, she had half her senses in the present and half of them elsewhere.

There were few candles lit in the Great Hall that night, but her cheeks burned nonetheless.

 

+

 

Sansa knocked three times, and before her hand had found her side again, the door swung open. There was no mockery in his clumsy smile, only happiness. Or so she hoped.

Two dark green banners hung from rods on the walls, one on each side of the hearth, but not too close. They reminded her of the great sentinels in the forest—evergreen, unbending even to winter, and taller than all the lesser trees. Sansa was pleased at the work her girls had done. There was even edging along the bottom in autumn gold. She heard him close and bar the door behind her

“Do you like them?” Sansa asked, nodding toward the banners. “They must be better than a plain, gray wall.”

“Gray suits me just fine,” he shrugged. _So it does._ “They’re pretty enough, but I don’t see why you made the trouble. It’s only you and I who’ll ever see them.”

“That suits _me_ just fine,” she replied. She took off her shawl and laid it across the back of a chair. “May I stay?” she asked, a moment too late.

“You don’t have to bloody well _ask_ me. Not for anything.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I am not without my courtesies,” she said.

“I don’t deserve your courtesies, girl,” he muttered.

“They are mine to give to whomever I please,” she said. He sat on the edge of his bed, assenting.

Her blue wool dress tied simply in the back, and she could manage it herself, but she preferred the feel of his fingers pulling at her laces. “Be careful,” she said, presenting her back to him. “This is my nicest dress.”

He began gently tugging at the stays, untying the bow near the small of her back and working his way up. When she felt that the dress was loose enough, she wriggled out of it and deposited herself in his lap in nothing but a thin chemise, as though it were only natural. It was always that way with him: she would catch herself being far too forward, and then not bother to correct it.

His lips were on hers insistently, possessively, and she delighted in their rough edges more than she ever thought she would. He would always feel different from any other man. She clung to him and met his onslaught with her own, her body turning hot and cold all at once.

Abruptly, he stopped kissing her and stood, standing her up with him. She gave a squeak when her feet unexpectedly landed on the floor.

“I can go slower. Not like last time,” he said, his heavy breaths disagreeing with his words.

She did not know what to say, so she only smiled sweetly at him. If it could be slower, she would be glad, but otherwise she did not mind.

Sandor moved around her and pulled back the covers and furs. His bed was narrower than hers, but longer, too. There was room for both of them, but only just. Sansa sat in the place he had made for her and began kicking off her slippers and stockings. His clothes landed on the floor with hers; he was not shy about being naked. Sansa found the hem of her chemise and pulled it over her head. Whether it was the cold or his gaze that made her skin prickle, she could not say. He made to climb into the bed with her, but she stayed him with her palm on his stomach.

_Wait,_ she thought. There were things she did not have time for the night before.

She touched his upper thigh, where the skin was puckered and the muscle was dented. He shifted uncomfortably under her touch. Her brows knit together as she felt the damage and understood how close he had come to dying, and how much it would have _hurt._ He had told her about Arya and about lying half-dead beneath a tree, but somehow it had sounded less serious than this. She met his eyes and found something she did not like—worry, or perhaps wariness. Sansa could not help herself. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to the worst of it like she had pressed her hand to his cheek all those dozens of times. She was well acquainted with ruin, and she was not afraid.

Brushing her fingertips across his manhood cautiously, she looked up to see him close his eyes and let out a breath.

“Show me,” she nearly whispered. “Show me how to touch you. I do not know what you like.”

“No,” he said, startling her. “You show me first.”

Sansa could feel the blush creeping up her neck. She only knew what she liked with herself, not with a man. She hadn’t liked anything with a man before him.

The bed creaked under his weight as he joined her. He saw her hesitating, but mercifully did not accuse her of it: he found her waist with his large hand, soothing her hot skin with his palm, and pressed little rough kisses to her jaw and her throat.

It almost did not feel real to be laid bare in a bed with him; it almost made her giddy, in an odd sort of way. She was learning what lovers do with the shroud of endless night overhead. She wondered if it was right, but her bones told her there was no other way.

After a moment, she took his hand and slid it lower, guiding him to where she had unsurely sought her own pleasure on lonely nights with the frigid wind screaming outside. She had thought of him with her fingers gliding across her smallclothes, and had come undone feeling confused and wanting and _empty._

Sandor’s hands always felt much better than hers, and this was no different. “There?” he asked, lightly stroking across that little spot she could not name, and her body answered for her. She whimpered, her hand pressing on top of his, begging for more pressure.

“Is that what you want, little bird?” he rumbled, his voice like curling smoke.

“Can you touch me there during, while we--?”

“I can manage that,” he said, watching her with something like astonishment.

This time, it hardly hurt at all when he entered her—there was the smallest sting of pain, but it was a sweet pain, and it fell away quickly. This time, she let him guide her legs up to anchor around him, forcing her to move when he did. This time, when he did as she asked, it was Sansa who found she could not hold out, could not wait for him. It was so different from being alone: she felt _him_ instead of that painful emptiness, and the waves took so long in building that it was equal parts panic and pleasure, until she finally clenched around him and shook apart. He watched her face until the very last moment, until he ripped out of her and shuddered long and hard. When he lifted himself away, she missed his weight and his warmth, and curled into his side.

“I gave the daggers to the master at arms after dinner,” she said some minutes later, lying boneless and sated in the dim firelight. She brought his fingers to her lips, kissed the line of red where he had tested the steel some hours before. “The sword is yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have yet to respond to your lovely comments from last chapter, but I wanted to get this one posted before I divert my attention to NaNoWriMo. Thank you so much for reading and commenting, and I will respond directly. :) Happy Halloween (a few hours late)!


	15. Chapter 15

“Do I look _handsome,_ little bird?” he said with a sneer. She cowed him with sapphire eyes and a simple _yes._ There was no lie in her love.

His new black tunic went well with his black cloak and gray breeches. She liked him in harsh, northern colors. She dressed him in black because it went well with his hair and it made him look terrifying, and perhaps she liked that. Green went well on him, too, just as it went well on age-old pines and fresh spring grass. Sansa thought about him in green when she should have been thinking about siege and attack, about barrels of ale and missing ravens.

The Valyrian blade hung at his hip, cradled in a new leather swordbelt.

“Will you name it?” she asked.

“No. It belongs to your brother.”

“I gave it to you.”

“And when I die trying to use it against one of those _things,_ it’ll be his,” he said flatly, like it meant nothing, like he still had nothing to live for. Her hand flew to her mouth and she pushed down her tears in the way she knew how. He was awful.

“Why would you say such a thing?” she said, feeling a twinge of satisfaction when he had the decency to look guilty. Her judgement dragged on; she was content to let it rest heavily between them.

“Because I’m a fool,” he said, “always biting the hand that feeds me.” _A fool and his cunt,_ she remembered, but it meant nothing. It was vitriol from his mouth like so many bats from a cave, but his words were empty.

“Swords are meant for cutting, Sandor. Words are not.”

That night, he did not take her in their usual way. He came to her room and disrobed: he arranged his new tunic and belt as though they were offerings at the shrine of some god, but he climbed into her bed and did little else. Sansa took mercy and curled around him: it was plain to see that he was forever chewing on something he could not swallow. He twirled an end of her hair around in his fingers, chased the goose prickles from her arms, palmed the gradual curve of her hip, but made no move to lie with her as a husband does a wife. Sansa wished that he would spit out whatever he was mulling on, but for selfish reasons. She knew the jagged terrain of his thoughts, could translate the language of his penitent fingers across her skin. The child who needed sweet words was dead, replaced by a woman who only wanted them.

Eventually, she grew tired. Only when her breathing slowed and her thoughts began to muddle did she hear the scrape of his voice. She did not bother to wake fully, for she already knew that he would die for her. He had told her long ago, when he promised not to lie.

+

It had been dark for days, or maybe weeks. There had been no sun, no stars, no moon, no clouds, nothing—not even the wind howled under the cover of blackness.

They were nearing the end of the firewood. There was always the option of breaking up the furniture, but that was a desperate measure, and Sansa did not want her people to know she was desperate. She quietly inquired if there were any men who would be willing to go to the edge of the forest to fell trees; she was surprised when there were several, and she was terrified when Sandor was one of them.

Sansa told them to organize just as they had in the past. Only a few men would go, and they would only go for a few moments, and there would always be men at the gate. Sansa crossed through the gate to the outer wall to watch over them. She knew she could do nothing if they were attacked, but it was her duty to look.

Rickon wrapped himself in a black pelt and solemnly walked beside her. On days such as today, she could see the Stark in him. It hid in his silent appraisal, his stiff expression, his darting eyes, but it was there. He was growing stronger, and Sansa was proud. If they lived, he would make a great king someday.

Atop the wall, surrounded by a handful of men with bows and torches that flickered despite the lack of wind, she watched the silent, snowy landscape. She wished she had a hawk’s eyes to see: she could barely make out the dozen men with torches. The darkness was consuming—it absorbed the light from the flames.

The men felled the first tree quicker than should have been possible. They slung it with ropes and tied it to a team of horses which dragged it back toward the gate, while the rest of the men set their axes to the second tree. Sansa found her jaw clenching, wishing every second that it would be over and done. Rickon stood before her, barely able to see over the stone wall. His impatient fingers danced across the edge of the stone, his leather gloves making not a sound. All was quiet; even the growl of the torch flames seemed subdued. Sansa could hear her heart hammering in her ears. The second tree fell, and then a third. After the fourth, she would call a halt.

It was nearly over before she saw what was happening. They came out of the forest faster than they had any right to, cold and dead as they were. _Wights, only wights,_ she thought, as Norrin’s plain steel blade brought one to the ground by removing a leg at the thigh, and another man’s torch turned it into a pyre of flame. It was said that wights caught fire like oiled cloth, and Sansa saw that it was true. It all happened so far away, so muffled and quiet in the dark, that it almost did not seem real. It was like watching a battle through someone else’s memory. Sansa breathed in, breathed out as evenly as possible. Rickon’s fingers were still.

A flash of black moved before the flames, sending the blade of an axe into a wight’s hip. The force of the hit crumpled it sideways almost comically, and then it was consumed in flames. A silent moment passed, and seven writhing masses of fire illuminated the night.

The men on the wall stared at their near-queen. She stared out from her perch. The men below faced outward in a ring, torches held just behind them so not to blind them.

Her eyes were on Sandor. He took long strides into the mouth of the forest and stood there watching, waiting. Some words over his shoulder sent the axes back to the last tree.

Along the outer wall, a beacon flickered and died.

 

+

 

_Fall back._   _  
_

The fourth tree felled, the dozen men at arms had swarmed back in through the gates. Two of the horses were of no use at all and had to be exchanged. Stranger pawed and then turned to stomping, his ears swiveling every which way. Sansa wondered why Sandor did not take him back to the stables, but then she realized he was not blown like the other horses. He was pulling _toward_ the gate, not away. He was as mad as his master.

She had thought to call a stop for the day. Something did not feel right. The men who had gone rubbed their hands, swigged from flagons and then made to go back out. She might have stopped them, but she did not.

_Fall back._

They went slightly off from where they had been before, and set into another thick trunk. They were slower than before; their axes were dulled, their swings more laborious. Their torches flickered in the still air. Sansa felt she might be sick.

“Enough,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Tell them to stop.” A man on the wall ran with her orders. Something glinted in the forest.

The light from a torch conjured the red in her brother’s curls, and then it did not. The wall went dark. She barely heard Rickon’s whimper from behind his gloves. Time did not exist. The edges of her vision blurred; the frozen stones sent pain shooting up her legs before she realized she was running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dropping in with a little update. Thanks for reading. :)


	16. Chapter 16

Horses rushed past her, followed by men. She nearly reached the gates before someone grabbed her around the middle and vaulted her into the air. When her feet hit the snowy ground, she tried to run again but was no match for the strong arms that held her.

They were closing the gates.

“ _No,”_ she yelled. “ _Not yet! Not yet!”_

She could see them just outside, the remaining few breaking and running. Something _glowed_ in the dark, glinted like ice and glass despite the lack of light. Her eyes could not even catch it. The white and blue was one with the snow and ice that covered the land.

She saw the red blade swing in a sharp arc; when it met something crystalline in the air, she was certain that no such sound had ever been made in the world before. She felt it more than heard it. It clanged through her ears and knocked her teeth together painfully; it felt as though someone had grabbed her by the head and shaken her.

The thing _paused._ If its unnatural eyes could focus, they were locked on the Valyrian steel. It was years and decades and centuries before the blades slid away from each other, their edges scraping and ringing terribly. The _Other_ was not a man: it was some wretched thing from some frozen hell, and the way it moved was jilted but swift and purposeful as a rushing stream. It was not human, but neither then was the Hound. He moved like a shadow. The thing twisted and met his blade, once, twice, and then three times, but even in all its cold fury, it could not block the savage blow from above.

It was not a man, and so it did not bleed. It shattered.

There was no flesh for his blade to cleave, no sickly-sweet resistance. His sword fell through the shard-littered air and landed in the snow, his hands and knees landing just behind it. Sansa heard a woman screaming.

She lived three lifetimes in the moment it took him to recover the sword, stumble to his feet and make a mad break for the gate. The wood and metal groaned before her—he had made it, he was safe—and the men scrambled to seal the castle from the demons made of ice.

Sansa could see them as the gates were closing slowly before her eyes. They stood in an eerie, haunting ring, not advancing or attacking. They simply watched.

 

+

 

She had been running, but now she could not move. Her feet stuck in the snow. Her mind did not work.

There was a horse loose and bolting, and some still tied together in a rat’s nest of panic. Men were shouting and frantically trying to reignite the torches. With the eerie blue glow from the Others locked on the other side of the wall, they were plunged into darkness. It was like trying to light the Great Hall with a single candle. With a stab in her chest, Sansa remembered the free folk who had chosen to stay in Wintertown. There was nothing she could do for them now.

All around her, there was chaos. She tried to think of what should be done, what would save them, but she was a girl standing alone at the end of the world and in her heart she knew there was nothing.

Then, all at once, the flints worked again and there was light.

Winter did not kill with clanging swords and rivers of battlefield blood. It killed with silence, stillness. It killed with fear. It killed with a thousand little almost-deaths, unhurriedly beating and carving like waves upon a shore.

The chaos shifted back into normalcy even as Sansa’s ears still rang from that horrible sound of metal and ice. Men lit the fires and women and children peaked out from behind doors and gates, curious about what had happened and just as suddenly stopped happening. Norrin and Barton and half a dozen men moved their lips at her, but she could not make out their words.

Just beyond where her eyes could focus, Sandor scrutinized his bloodless blade held in his left hand, and flexed and shook his right, seemingly as dazed as she.

 

+

 

Sansa did not know how they could eat dinner in a time such as this, and yet they did. They ate dinner, and chopped wood, and tended to chickens, and nodded to one another in corridors as though they weren’t at the mercy of a legion of the dead.

The Others were gone. There was no blue glow beyond Winterfell. The men on the walls could see nothing. Wintertown was quiet, they said, and Sansa tucked herself into a windowless nook in a castle wall and wept. The stones rested warmly behind her back, unaccusing.

Hours later, she spooned potatoes and gravy into her mouth, slowly and with great effort, for her hands and arms and ribs were still shaking like a dish of pudding. Rickon had begged to eat in his room, and she had allowed it, but the Lady of Winterfell had no such luxury. The Great Hall was full: everyone who had taken refuge behind the walls was there. If they were waiting for her to speak, they would keep waiting. She did not trust her voice. She had no pretty words to chirp at them. It was not like the night of the Blackwater: these were people of the north, not tittering court-dwelling fools, and there were no answers. The right words always seemed to find her, but not tonight. Perhaps that meant there weren’t any right words.

_Gentle Mother, font of mercy…_

She finished her dinner out of duty and appearance, stood on the dais and wished them all a goodnight. Oddly, the few faces she caught as she was leaving look relieved.

Sansa wanted her brother. She wanted Sandor, too, but he always came later. He was behind everything else: a thing belonging to the hour of the wolf, unwelcome among routine and reason. Little Bird was a skin she slipped into when no one was watching, when he cradled her like she was truly made of feather and bone.

Sandor was in Rickon’s room when she got there. They had eaten at his small table before the hearth. Her brother’s face was flushed and pinched, his earlier stoicism forgotten. Sansa had interrupted something; their unspoken words hung heavily between them. She sighed and seated herself at the table anyway. She could not go back out again, now that she was there among them. Rickon stared sullenly into the fire for a while before slowly becoming more talkative in a fretful way. They had their daily observance of all the places Shaggydog could be—beyond the wall, in the Riverlands, in the forest, in the lands of always winter, _dead_. She hushed him and told him there was no reason to be afraid, as always, but later she tucked him in for bed, lit two candles, pressed a desperate kiss to his forehead and began to pray in earnest. Rickon needed his wolf, and there would be no replacement for him. If Shaggy was gone, so was her brother.

The boy would not be soothed. He no longer raged as he once did, but he still squirmed and _whimpered_ sometimes like he was half wolf himself. Sansa sat near him on his bed, and Sandor sat at the foot—not saying anything, merely offering his presence, which must have been what boys needed from men in times such as these. Sansa thought of them as the very picture of worried parents and something in her chest cracked.

“Don’t go anywhere,” the boy said suddenly, after he had calmed somewhat. “I can’t stay here by myself.”

Sansa soothed his forehead as though he had a fever. “Neither of us would ever leave you, Rickon.”

“That’s what Osha said.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short little update. Forgive me for the delays.


	17. Chapter 17

She could feel the excitement humming in his muscles even across the distance between them. Some things did not change. Perhaps killing was no longer his sweetest thing, but it was still sweet as plum wine, and he liked it. Sansa liked it too, this time. She wanted that thing dead. She wanted them all dead. They _deserved_ it, whatever they were. Her hands would never be strong enough to crush or hit or shatter, and her arm could never lift a sword.  His were. His could. Once the fear had gone, all she had felt was victory. It must have been blood lust. _Yes, yes, yes, yes,_ she thought, her heart beating madly and pointlessly. One of the Others was gone. They had triumphed, if only once. She did not concern herself with why they had come or why they had stopped. It did not matter, not now. She was on him before they got through her chamber doors. Something odd in the back of her mind echoed that it was usually the _man_ eager for a fuck after a kill, but she did not care. His and hers were the same, and it did not matter. Whatever was under his skin that was warm and merciless and _alive_ was what she wanted.

Some men were made for the end of the world, it would seem.

Sandor had his own sort of intelligence. Eat, drink, fuck, fight, kill maybe, die maybe. That’s what it all came down to in the end, wasn’t it? He had it all ferreted out. Years ago. All the rest was rubbish. All the rest was gone.

_“Rip it,”_ she commanded as his fingers tangled in her laces. What was one dress? It was nothing.

Sansa had never wished to be taller until this very moment. On her toes, she hooked the back of his neck and slammed her mouth into his, slammed her body into his. Something primal rumbled in his throat as the back of her dress ripped open and exposed her to the cold air. She shoved it off of her shoulders and reached for him again, because any moment away was too much, was too _cold._

Her back hit the bed, her head bobbing backwards then forwards again. She felt drunk. She felt there was nothing else in the world. The sound of his belt clearing his straps brought her back, but he was just staring at her as he always was. She knew what it meant now. He was trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of looks into a spattering of days, a handful of nights, like it was the last time he would ever drink wine, the last time he would ever breathe air. He stared at her because he wanted her shape burned into his eyes for all of eternity, wherever he would be spending it. Sansa understood. It was the same for her and touch. She wanted to feel him until the moment she died.

He pushed inside her, quicker than they had done before, and it stung a bit but it was better that way. Sansa liked how the pain blurred into pleasure: it was realistic.  It was apt. And when it sweetened, gods, it was everything.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was shoving on his shoulders. He jumped from her like she had burned him, fear flitting across his features, but she did not give him time to think on it as she climbed atop him. They had not done it like this before. She wanted to try it. Would there be a better time? Would there be another time, even? Her breasts bounced obscenely as she found her movement, and she felt like an utter fool until she glanced at his face and saw a man who had stumbled into an eighth heaven. His hands were on her hips, digging in, moving as she did, and it was harder than he had ever handled her before but it was perfect. The tears started rolling even as her body betrayed her and came far before she was ready, far before she was done. He had to lift her to pull himself out as he found his pleasure, and then she cried in earnest because he had to, because he couldn’t. They couldn’t.

His arms wrapped around her, held her tight. It might have been embarrassing, in another life: they were both sweating, shaking things, panting and heaving in the dark. He was covered in his own seed and she in her own tears. It might have been odd, in any other combination of days and years that had brought them here. As things stood, it was alright. It was to be expected.

His hand cradled the back of her head, so gently it renewed her sobbing. He breathed into her hair. The air fogged between them.

 

+

 

“I was afraid you were going to die,” she said.

“Were you?” he answered.

“Of course,” she whispered, wide-eyed.

He _smiled._ The cur.

The fire in the kitchens was low. This was their place, inappropriate or not. How many nights had they whispered away? Sansa cupped her mulled cider in her palms to warm them. She was thinking of what she might do, what she might say. She was queen, or close to it. There would be no one to make a decision for her.

“Why don’t they just finish us?” she asked, mostly to herself.

“Either they’re just toying with us, or they can’t.”

“What do you mean, they can’t?”

“Winterfell. Wasn’t it built for all this?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Winter,” he said, waving his hand as if to indicate the whole gods-damned thing. “Ice spiders. Wights. All the bloody northern creatures.”

“Are you suggesting sorcery, Sandor?”

“I’m _suggesting_ there must be a reason. That’s all.”

The fire crackled. He eyed it warily from time to time. Sansa had at first found it odd how he treated every regular table candle like a potential foe, monitoring it without any conscious thought. Eventually, she understood. That is what frightful things do: they weave themselves into the spaces between ribs and settle into hair like the smell of smoke. Terrors always invite themselves to stay a while.

“It didn’t seem right,” he mumbled.

“What didn’t?”

“The one I killed. It didn’t seem right. It swung its sword like a man. It tried to kill me just like a man might. All the instincts were there, but it was different.”

Sansa sighed. “I cannot hope to understand what you mean.”

“It’s like it was _hollow_ ,” he said. “It fought, but there was nothing behind it. Like fighting an old man, or one who’s half-drunk.”

“Do you mean... it was not strong?”

He thought for a long while. So long, in fact, that Sansa began to think he had not heard her and she ought to repeat her question.

“It should have been strong, but it wasn’t.”

 

+

 

Sansa surprised him by sending him away. He had been sharing her bed more often than not of late. She saw the momentary surprise cross his face, but he only nodded and stepped aside, ever dutiful. She watched him disappear down the hall, fondly.

She began by stoking the fire and adding a few small pieces from her own pile of wood. She only needed enough to see by for a few moments: she had learned to sleep in this unnatural cold, with her head under the covers. She was a wolf, heating her den with her own breath. The thought made her smile.

She laid out a clean shift, a clean dress, clean stockings. Her newly repaired boots were chosen for their practicality over slippers. This is how she made herself into a straw queen: in measured steps, with practiced grace. She had no crown to wear, but she imagined she did. It helped her remember to hold her head up. She wished, for the first time in months, for some of the fineries promised to her years ago. A dress made from the finest cloth-of-silver, some pale jewels for her pale throat. They would go well with her cloak. She had none of the trappings of royalty. None at all, save for her blood. It would have to do.

Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow, she would not huddle like a mole in the ground and wait for the Stranger to crush her with his mighty boot. There was much to do. Sansa slept, and dreamt of dragons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to humbly apologize for how long this story has been unattended, and for all of your thoughtful and gorgeous comments I have yet to respond to from the last chapter. I just haven't had any mojo and I've been doing the bare minimum in most of my endeavors in life. In the meantime, I can say that this is probably close to wrapping up and it will not be abandoned, even if updates are slow. I hope this little update doesn't disappoint.


	18. Chapter 18

When Sansa woke, she half expected to see the pale yellow dawn streaking through the curtains. Something treacherous had visited her in the night, dark and bubbling like the pools in the godswood. She had thrashed around in her sheets and her sweat all night, trapped in dreams or nightmares or something of the like, somehow aware that she felt sickly and awful but unable to drag herself into wakefulness to address it. Now that it was morning, she couldn’t remember what the dreams were about.

The cold air smacked against her skin wherever it was exposed; she noticed it, but it held no power over her. A person can get used to nearly anything. For the hundredth time, there was a thin layer of ice in the washing bowl. Sansa rinsed the feeling of linen from her mouth and scrubbed her face. After donning the clothing she had chosen the night before, she brought the top half of her hair into a braid and tied it with a plain, gray cord. It would be a plain, northern day. That was the entire point.

There would be no fighting. She hadn’t the men for it, or they didn’t have the strength. She would not open the gates, and the Others would not cross them. She mourned for those who had chosen to remain in Wintertown, but she would not dishonor them by belittling their choice. A man’s right to choose is one of the things he must hold on to as long as he draws breath. A woman must make her choices wherever she can.

“Get up!” she sang, grabbing at her brother’s feet through the mountain of covers and furs. Rickon sat up straight as a spear, eyes wide, hair mussed and puffed from sleep. The firelight shone in his auburn hair, almost like sunlight.

“Come on, then. I have your clothes ready.”

Rickon rose and crept over toward the fireplace. He dutifully dressed in front of the tiny flame. When he had first returned from Skagos, he had hated the feeling of regular clothes on his skin. Linen or wool made no matter, and he would paw and scratch at where the seams landed until he was welted and bleeding. Everything had been a battle.

She busied herself with wetting a cloth to give him privacy. She turned and tossed it to him after a time.

“You are to report to Maester Haywyn for your lesson after breakfast. Then, I want to speak to you about the food and the firewood.”

“What’s the point in having a lesson?” he growled.

“This one is very important. You are to learn about how we have kept ourselves alive these past months, and how we could do it far longer if we needed to. You will want to behave well so you can practice with the rest of the men this afternoon.”

“Sansa—“ he began, but it was no use. It was decided.

 

+

 

When he first saw her, she took his breath away. She noticed because she was no fool. She was coming down a wide staircase in an excited flutter, and she knew what that must have looked like. Even through the dark and the din, his eyes always latched onto her.

“Sandor!” she called, as though he might turn and run if she did not root him down.

Of all the expressions she caused him to flinch out a mockery of, _stricken_ was her favorite. It was wicked, but she reveled in it. He could not make his eyes lie to her.

“Sandor,” she said, breathlessly.  “I needed to speak with you. Quickly.” The Hound cocked his head like a dog.

“When all of this is over and we begin to act civilized and rebuild everything, I am going to make you captain. It won’t be official until... Well, until. But you and the other men should resume exercise in the Great Hall this afternoon. We have all been lax, and it is not healthy.”

“ _What?”_ he sneered. She was his stupid little bird again.

“Barton will not mind. You two seem to get along quite well. And I have given you an order: train the men.”

“Sansa, you’ve gone mad.”

“Might be,” she said, already turning down the hall to the kitchens. In fact, she thought she was hardly mad at all. She was the most sane she had been in weeks. The muscles in her limbs felt full with life instead of full with river stones.

Perhaps there was not enough Stark in her: something told her that winter was not coming, it was ending.

 

+

 

The Great Hall was _alive._ It had not been so for quite some time. It was as close as they could reasonably get to a feast without being wasteful. Waste was dangerous in such a time, despite Sansa’s growing optimism. Once again, Sansa was reminded of animals in a den, churning and snuffling and surviving in an instinctual way. All the creatures in the world were not so different.

Quietly, she had asked Maester Haywyn to oversee the breaking of the furniture in remote parts of the castle. They needed the wood, but there was no need to alarm anyone. Besides, the raucous in the hall masked any sound that might have been created by the trusted few assigned to the task. Sansa sometimes thought on all of the end tables and shelves and unused chairs in all the rooms she had ever inhabited, and somehow it all seemed so foolish. A man wouldn’t look to a robin’s egg for food unless he was starving; he wouldn’t look to a lady’s wardrobe for wood unless he was freezing.  Everything had changed.

The ale was flowing; some of it had not even been watered. For once, there was laughter, and singing, and warmth. The only thing missing was light. Rickon was even smiling, sitting on the dais. It was rare for him. Sansa’s heart ached for her brother, for he would not know. He could not possibly remember what everything was like before _._ Everything had been so wonderful. It all seemed like a dream at times, how it had been.

Sansa herself had a mug full of ale. Though she did not care for the taste, it seemed improper not to join in.

Though they were still conservative with candles, fire licked the walls in bright flashes of copper and gold. There was a coziness to it, this oppressive darkness. Something about it had become comfortable. Without sunlight, life had become simpler, more compact. Things that could not survive in the daytime had shot up in the dark like mushrooms in a cellar. Someday she would have to go back, but not tonight.

After some time, her head began to swim and she abandoned her ale for some water. It would not do to lose her wits, even if she desperately wanted to. Her thoughts floated up and up like ashes from a bonfire, swirling bright and brazen against the black sky. It was time to go. There was somewhere else she wanted to be.

The chamber door complained as it opened. Sansa hoped he would be there. Where else would he be? She was struck with the urge to smile and sigh wistfully like the girl she had been. It was all a bit romantic when she stopped to think about it, which she often didn’t. It would make a lovely song, sweet and sad. It wouldn’t be the kind sung by singers: it would be the kind sung by broken old men in the dark corners of brothels and winesinks.

“Sandor?” she asked the darkness.

“We don’t have much time, do we?” he asked, appearing like some dark apparition.

“We never did.”


	19. Chapter 19

It was a dance, of sorts, or it would have been if it had held more grace and less desperation. It was slower than it had ever been, more meaningful than it had ever been, and it was still far too fast, far too reaching. Knowing that everything would soon go back to the way it had been was almost worse than knowing they would die at any moment. Sansa felt she had climbed half the Wall and then been told to climb back down.

When she climbed atop him, she did so because she wanted to see him, wanted to keep her eyes wide open in the still hours before the break of day. If it was to be the last time, she wanted to remember his heat against her skin, the map of his body under her hands, the tangle of limbs and fingers that meant she was wanted for herself. He did not covet the fact of her blood or what the cradle of her hips would one day birth. He was not a man lost in duty or power: he was lost in her and her alone. When she was an old woman who could not hold a needle between her bloodless fingertips, she wanted to close her eyes and see his mangled face and remember that she was loved. She was not stupid. When the darkness lifted, there would be no more seclusion, no more peace. The realms of men would come rushing back, suddenly remembering they were in the business of greed.

His hands helped guide her fluid motions, though she was still a novice and would now have little time to learn. If one day she had to lie beneath a man and stare at the bedposts and will her body to unclench, at least she would have had this.

He sat up swiftly, grabbing the back of her head and crushing her mouth with his own. That’s what he would miss: all the things a whore had never given him and never would, all the things some other northern woman might give him if he let her, but now he couldn’t. Sandor couldn’t make his jagged mouth form the word, but that didn’t stop him from telling it with every act of his being. He loved her in the way a husband loves a wife, in the way a dog loves its master, in the way a septon loves his gods. All this she knew. All this he told her, though he spoke not a word on the matter. She would have his eternal devotion. Sansa, for her part, had tasted too much of life in a few short years. She knew it would never be, not as long as there were stars in the sky. She could love him in the night, love him like some secret, budding thing to be kept nestled in her soul, but she could never love him with everything. She was not brave enough. If the years turned in on themselves and gave them some inkling of a chance of staying together like this, there would be no one more shocked than Sansa Stark.

Sansa changed herself to fit the situation, and so she changed herself to meet the hitch of his hips, to aid his blessed intrusion into her body. Randa had told her that it could be this, that it could _feel good_. Sansa had imagined it like a warm bath or a full stomach, something pleasant but mild, but she had been thoroughly mistaken. _Good_ was no word for it. It was piercing; rapturous. Nothing else would ever rival it, as far as she could tell.

She came wrapped around him with both her arms and her legs, her face pressed into the marred side of his neck, begging for one more moment, one more time. After a pause, she realized he was still inside, still hard, still waiting. She nodded, and he gently rolled her over. He moved so slowly that she shattered again, weakly and sweetly, like an afterthought. Faithfully, he spilled into her bedsheets with groan, and lay panting half atop her for some time after. After all this time, if the wetness on his face was not blood or sweat, it was far beyond either of them to care.

 

+

 

Something tingled at the edge of her senses, willing her to wake. The slow draw up from her dreams was honey-smooth and amber. Sansa felt peaceful and lazy; it was all the effort in the world to open her eyes and blink, to point her toes toward the base of the bed and stretch.

He was staring down at her as she used his arm as a pillow. Sansa hoped she had not been drooling. She smiled sleepily at him.

“How long have you been awake?” she asked.

“Not long.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

He did not answer. There was something different in his gaze on this morning. Sansa could not quite put a name to it. She was getting used to all his odd behaviors, so she didn’t think much on it. At times it seemed that even he did not understand what he was doing. She closed her eyes again and curled back into his side. A few more moments could do no harm.

It occurred to her suddenly. Her skin was warm; the air was warm. Beyond her eyelids, the room was light _._ She snapped her head back up. She looked to him, almost in confirmation. His eyes were the flash of a new blade in the summer sun.

Before she could stop herself, she was up and running across the room to the window. She shoved the curtains apart, and saw the slow flutter of dust in the sunlight for the first time in weeks, maybe months. Laughter bubbled up from her middle in a fit of madness. It was so bright, so blinding, that she just closed her eyes against it and felt it on her skin instead.

“Sandor,” she laughed, “Sandor, did you see? The sun...” It stole her words. All she could do was smile so hard that her cheeks ached. Tears of relief pricked behind her eyes, but it was not a day for tears.

“Sandor?”

She turned, readjusted her sight to the room behind her. It was then that she realized what she must have looked like: naked as her nameday, with her sunlit hair streaming wildly down her back and her fists bunched in the heavy velvet drapes. Perhaps that is why he only watched her, propped up on his elbows in her bed.

 

+

 

Sansa stepped out, cautious and bleary, squinting and smiling into the sun. The boots she had not bothered to lace squelched in the mud beneath her. All around, people were running and whooping and laughing and crying, all the sounds of celebration. It was heart-wrenching, this simple happiness, this release of a thousand fears.

There was nothing else to do but walk out into the blazing white morning, hands held out like some statue in a sept, and feel the lightness of everything hit her at once.

The ice was melting; the drips and drops sounded like rainfall behind all the noise. What had been snow was now muddy slush threatening to steal boots and ruin hems, yet mothers who still had children let them gleefully slop all around.

The air still held a chill; it would have been foolish to believe that winter was over with the snap of her fingers and all was going to be well. Right then, however, she could not bring herself to think of all the dark hours yet to come. There was only the now; there was only the dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosh, I really hope you all like this chapter. This story is drawing to a close, and with that comes anxiety. The next chapter is the last one. Thank you for sticking with it...


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, it's been a month. Sorry. :(

Rickon’s twelfth nameday passed without incident; so different from the boy who had been dropped into her lap a few years ago, he was growing taller and more sure of himself by the day. He was a very tremulous, very young King in the North, whose continued success depended entirely upon the ruling women who upheld him, but King he was and would be until there came another. Sansa, for the most part, was the mind behind the throne, though she longed for the day when she could shrug her shoulders and let slip the heavy cloak of duty. She refused to be queen in any capacity; when visiting diplomats inquired about her title, she replied simply and demurely that she was sister to the King and nothing more. What else would she be?

The war for the break of day had been won, not by the valor of men, but by a red witch’s sorcery and dragons from a far-off land. Red-rippled blades turned up from all the corners of the kingdoms, and then disappeared just as quickly once the fighting was done. Now, even years later, the pieces had not entirely been set. Sansa was no fool, and so she knew there would be no rest for her. Not for years to come. The young queen, in all her fickle splendor, was not a friend to be made lightly or held easily. Sansa was weary from tasting the space between silences; she longed for a simple conversation, a short letter, an uncomplicated day. She was tired from performing for this new queen and all her new houses and banners. She was tired from turning away suitors.

The new queen Daenerys brought the most unwelcome of old faces: Sansa’s _husband,_ who quickly made it clear that he was no husband at all, and he wished for them both to be free of an extinct house’s last grasp at power. Sansa felt relief and nothing more. When he expressed a desire to visit, she shocked the realm by denying him. She had heard that he was bitter about it on his deathbed, but to the present day could not muster any feeling. Could a wrist freed from a chain feel _happiness,_ or could it only feel a sense of rightness, of remembering that it should not have been shackled in the first place? That is how Sansa felt about a great many things, these days.

Her previous excuse exhausted, she had no choice but to tell any lord who came tentatively knocking that she could not possibly think of marriage at a time like this, with Rickon’s rule so new and tender. She would not ever dream of jeopardizing his claim. Naturally, since she only had one sibling left, she would be ever so faithful and true. They thought her insane, or drafty in the head, or maybe even rude, but they left without reward and that was the only thing that mattered to Sansa. The lines of peace were so shakily drawn, and all the kingdoms were so thoroughly depleted, that nobody could have gone to war over it even if they wished to. Nobody save Daenerys, but she claimed to understand. 

Winterfell clawed itself back into working order. Every day, the surrounding towns and camps filled with more smallfolk. They may not have had finery, wealth, or prestige, but they had strength in numbers and in spirit. The North would remember; the North would prepare.

+

Wolves howled in the night. The tremendous pack from winter had splintered into several smaller groups which roamed freely. Shaggydog was among them. At times he circled back around to Winterfell and trotted through the gates as though he never left. Rickon had learned to sense him from a distance and no longer wept for his absence; as Sandor said, it was time for him to stop being a nursemaid and start being a wolf again.

Sansa’s chambers were newly but modestly decorated, with green wall hangings to signify the spring, and a new set of chairs to set before the fireplace. There had been fabric enough for new dresses for quite some time, but Sansa found that she had become rather used to wool. She had learned to find beauty in coarse things. She sat before the fire in her solar, plucking out the ruined parts of her embroidery. Though she still enjoyed the act, it seemed as though none of her projects could please her. Her dogs looked like wolves and her wolves looked like dogs, and she could never quite choose between all the new threads and fabrics she had ordered. Her hands itched to make something she could not allow herself to make.

Her wait had been long, and it was not yet ended.

+

They stalked each other. They met eyes in crowded halls; their thoughts and feet strayed when they ought to have remained true. Sansa wondered if either of them had any choice in the matter. The years turned in on themselves after the dark winter had passed, feeling like centuries and minutes at the same time. Sansa raised a king; Sandor trained his men. They each had their duties to tick by the hours. She loved her brother more than she could put into words, and lived to see him growing tall. Every night she prayed to her menagerie of gods that he would rule for peaceful decades like Jaehaerys, but there were so many things that could go horribly wrong that Sansa’s head swam if she prayed for too long. If she spent only half of her time in the Godswood or the Sept invoking the gods, and the other half sitting with a sad, old hound, it was for her own happiness and she felt no guilt over it whatsoever. There had to be something more than duty and honor.

There were guards who patrolled the halls at night, but their footsteps sounded different from his.

It was not something from a song, that much was certain. Nor was it something for the light of day. It lived in the dusky in-between, halfway between waking and dreams. It was a fragile, slow-growing thing, which flinched away if Sansa tried to look at it closely. And yet, it lived, as they had. She would not call it love. Could not.

The chamber door had been oiled so it no longer creaked. It swung lightly on its hinges, quiet as a sigh.

Sansa branded him. He wore the cloak of a Stark loyal, ash-gray with white trim. She sent him black tunics tied up in golden ribbons, new leather boots, fine sealskin gloves. He never said a word, just dressed in her trappings from head to toe. It would have been there, plain to see, for anyone who cared to look, yet somehow few did. She was not without her own marks: fingerprints on her hips, wrinkles in her sheets, her lips red as rosebuds.

Perhaps it was the secrecy of it, but her heart always hammered when he stepped through the door.

By day, she set pieces in motion years in advance, trying to carve out some future of her own design. It was far-reaching. Sansa knew it may never come to pass. But to fill the hours, she tried. By night, she lived as though it were already true.

Some things did not change: Sansa moved first, always. And she looked him straight in the face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I can't believe I actually wrote a thing. It blows me away. It's nothing compared to some of the amazing works I've read by others, but it's a start. A most sincere THANK YOU to anyone who has been following this story, especially those of you who have left encouraging comments. You have helped me through one of the worst winters of my life, and I mean it. Thank you for your commentary on my writing, and I hope that you will give me one final review now that it's over. If something worked or didn't work for you, I would love to know about it so I can improve my writing in the future (also, to anyone who reads this in the distant future, it's never too late to leave a comment!). Everybody in this fandom is so awesome. Thanks for reading!


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